Today, I'm trying out Cuil.com, the new search competitor to Google, claiming to search over 120 billion web pages. Michael Arrington reports in TechCrunch:
Cuil also claims to have better search results than Google and others based on how they index websites. They do not simply catalog keywords on a site and then rank the site based on its importance. They also work to understand how words are related (France - cheese - wine, for example), to return more relevant results to users.
So I did a quick vanity search to see what came up. As with Google, my podcast and blog sites did come up first, but with odd photos of random strangers attached:
I'm just really wondering who that old guy listening to my podcast is. And who's the blond setting the table next to my website? The Jaiku photo almost looks like me, but it's not.
Was it just me? I did a search for the internet-famous Shel Holtz, out of curiosity, and got better results:
His handsome visage is connected to every one of his sites. So perhaps it's just the plethora of "Heidi Miller"s that gave the wonky photo results on Cuil. And just because I've been trying out 12Seconds.TV: