Cuil still needs some work
Sometimes I fight a battle over my desire to rebel against Google's steady march toward being rulers of the universe (and their questionable respect for privacy), and my desire to rebel against the people who think it is cool to use the new, fad search engines that pop up on a regular basis. So, usually I try out new search engines hoping that they will give me some kind of substantive reason for breaking up with Google.
This morning I read about a new engine designed by former Google engineers, which promises to be more aware of people's privacy concerns. The site also claims to have a more comprehensive search algorithm, and thus, better results. It is called Cuil and you can try it out here.
I did try it out with disapointing results.
As many of you know, for many years, I had an ungooglable name. If you searched for Miles Travis, you would alway get results for distances, directions, and race results because no matter how much my name appeared on the web, it was dwarfed by the amount of information related to miles as a measure of distance.
That all changed last fall, when Google introduced a new technology that was better at indexing blogs, and also seemed to do a better job of ranking instances of "Miles" and "Travis" used together in proper context. Now you can type in Miles Travis, and the top 4 results are me, even if they are mostly oldish pages that I should update. Google also does well for Brooklynne (6 of the top 10 results), Halleigh (10 of 10), and even Kona Bean (6 of 10)!
Cuil is not so good. Miles Travis yields no relevant results. In fact, Cuil seems to live up to it promise of being more comprehensive because it includes alot of spam results--sites that aggregate keywords and phrases that don't necessarily match up well with their content. Search for Halleigh Travis and you will see a lot of results for key phrases I have used to describe Halleigh Show videos on youtube, but when you click on these, the pages have nothing to do with Halleigh or her videos. Weird.
I think I'll stick with Google for now. What are your favorite search engines? Any new trendy ones that I should try out?
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So I googled myself and have come up with a few lives I could adopt based on google results for Cory Green.
Scenario 1: I could play baseball for the Southern Arkansas Muleriders. Yes, Muleriders. In this life I'd be 5-10, 180 lbs, and a man.
Scenario 2: I have been quoted saying the following: “We ran the play and it just happened to work. Bosco is a leader and a returning starter. She is very quick and athletic and can beat people off the dribble. She's a great defender, she's a scrappy player.”
and “Not only can she shoot, but she hustles, she really gets after it.”
Scenario 3: I am a 227 lb defensive end from Cecilia, LA. I'm also 30, I'm not ready to be 30. And still a man by the way.
Scenario 4: I am listed in a golf pairing website from Ontario, it appears to be like E-Harmony for golfers? Apparently I'm willing to gamble about 10 dollars a game, I belong to a private club, I golf several times a week, I don't have a USGA index and I'm willing to play coed.
Scenario 4: Finally, I am still male and live in Louisiana, but now my sun sign is Cancer and my Chinese sign is "water dog" -which I really don't want to be likened to a soggy, smelly dog. And according to me, "Just trying to make it without worrying myself to death. Trying to keep life simple."
I think I prefer my life...