In trying to tackle the daunting challenge of providing an image for every search result, Cuil's search algorithm has run into some big snags. Users are upset that pictures of their companies' products or people are running alongside rivals' search results. Cuil responds.Two days into general public use and startup search engine Cuil is already
in hot water.
Thanks to quirks in Cuil's search algorithm, search results of some brands are
popping up with pictures of competing or even irrelevant brands.
Cuil Vice President of Communications Vince Sollitto just told me Cuil's
engineers are working on the problem. Sollitto indicated that the bug was a
bump in the road of the company's challenge in trying to provide an image next
to every search result.
The point of this is to offer a visual aid to help the user determine if
that result is one the user wants to explore further. Instead of reading the
200-word snippet about the result next to the image, the user can use the image
to decide if the result is click-worthy.
"We are 36 hours in and are no doubt discovering bugs and fixing them
left and right and we'll continue to improve," Sollitto said.
Fair enough, but if Cuil doesn't rectify the problem, people won't get to
the search results. They won't go to Cuil, period.
Sollitto also apologized for the July 28 access issues, noting that
overwhelming traffic hampered the company's servers' ability to make the search
engine available 24/7.
The brands that pop up may be related to the search result, but it's mixed
marketing messages that users are concerned about, according to comments I received in my Cuil review earlier today, July 29.
Trenton Baker, a marketing manager for network storage vendor Aberdeen,
said several of his company's industry-specific search results ended up with misused
Web site photos and misleading content results.
For example, a search for "Network Attached Storage" returns a result
from NAS Network Attached Storage Server Review.
The problem is that the picture associated with this review on the results page
is one of Aberdeen's own NAS devices, but when you click on the image,
it takes you straight to the review.
A search of "Storage Servers" returns a news release
about a product from Aberdeen rival
SMC Networks. Yet the product picture Cuil gives for this result is lifted from
an array on Aberdeen's front page.
Click on the picture link and instead of going to www.aberdeeninc.com,
you go to the SMC press release. You get the idea.
"Unfortunately for small companies such as Aberdeen
that try to compete with the likes of Dell and IBM,
this search engine creates more harm than good," Baker told me. "The
branding that Aberdeen is
attempting to create is quickly eroded with the product imaging misuse and
content confusion."
Or take the comments from Jim Lapic, who said when one of his
company's keywords was searched on Cuil, "several of the other sites
listed had images from our site next to their names."
Lapic claimed this was a keyword that gets over 10,000 searches a month, so it
is not an obscure keyword with minimal results. He tried other keywords his
company ranks well for and found several sites that had his company's images
next to them. Lapic concluded:
This seems to me to be
very deceptive. Our competitors will be shown with our images, many of which
[sic] unique to our company. With Cuil I found myself clicking on results based
on the images as I could readily determine "yes, that's what I was looking
for". I wonder how many have done the same thing clicking on our images
but ending up on other websites.
There is definitely a search algorithm issue going on
with Cuil, where the pictures are fairly, if not entirely, irrelevant. Cuil
must address this and soon.
I asked Sollitto when Cuil might fix the misleading image issue. He said he can't
promise that it will be perfect tomorrow, but that Cuil will "take
dramatic steps on it in the next 24 to 48 hours."
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