Wish Orchard

Thought I’d go ahead and make a couple more observations.

Why Does Cuil Appeal to Me at all?

I’m the kind of guy who likes flashy new things — though I can’t afford the finest and fastest in electronics. I do have a Wii that I got the black friday after launch, and I do have an iPod Touch on the way — but I don’t have an XBox 360, a GPS system in my car, or a computer that’s less than a couple years old. But free stuff is always nice. Especially free stuff on the web that looks good, works pretty well, etc. So that’s a little bit more about what appeals to me about Cuil.

Adding Cuil to Your Search Box in Your Browser

One thing I figured out the day after my last Cuil post is that I could add Cuil search to my search engine box at the top of my browser. One neat thing about that is if you’re in Firefox the link on the Cuil homepage (under the search box) says “Add Cuil to Firefox.” And if you’re in Internet Explorer it says “Add Cuil to Internet Explorer.” I was curious so I checked Safari and Opera, too, but no dice there. But I suppose you can’t cater to every browser out there.

124,426,951,803 web pages .. and counting???

Another thing that stood out to me is that the statement still says the same thing it did yesterday: “Search 124,426,951,803 web pages.” This communicates a couple things to me: 1) We haven’t added any pages to our search engine since yesterday. 2) Okay, I guess that’s about it, but it’s the implications that bug me: I would assume that you are growing daily, since you tend to read that xxxx number of websites are added to the world wide web every day, hour, or second. So, you’re not getting all the new ones. On the other hand, they still don’t have my Duckingham site, though I did find a way to submit the site. (After you’ve clicked “About Cuil”, “Webmaster Info” is one of the links that comes up in the bottom navigation. )

On the one hand I wouldn’t expect the “124,426,951,803″ to be updated every time they add a new page to their search engine, on the other hand I would expect it to be updated fairly regularly (i.e. once a day, once an hour … something). I’ll keep watching the number as I go through my experiences this week.