The Cuil Trick
Some search engine caught everyone’s attention today. Cuil was supposed to be the next Google according to – well, first of all, … Google. But also the New York Times, the BBC, SlashDot, CNET and much more…
I’ve been working on a “new approach to web search” for a while either, and what Cuil did, I must say, is very clever.
If you search for anything which for sure will not yield in any results, for example jakldfjasdfhjklasdfaajdkfla, you will be facing a error message saying “No results because of high load…”.
I highly doubt that this has to do anything with the load. They are just not prepared to admit that there is simply no result for this query at all.
This rises the question: What is better? Admitting that there is too much load or admitting that there is no result at all? I’d go for the latter. Unless you’re cheating. Meaning, while showing the error message, going sneakingly grabbing results from other search engines and aggregate them. Or why else would you write “Please try your search again.”? You would only do that if you know that the next attempt would return some useful results. Usually, this is the case. Not however with jakldfjasdfhjklasdfaajdkfla.
Of course, the first thing I tried today was the vanity search. At first I got the too much traffic error. At present, I get 1,628 results.
emcons.net gets me currently 398 irrelevant hits. Let’s see how many there will be tomorrow…