Google's approach to web search is to prioritize sites with lots of links to them (authority-based, similar to how citation analysis is used to measure research importance). A startup called Cuil ("cool") is trying something different. According to Wired, "Rather than trying to mimic Google's method of ranking the quantity and
quality of links to Web sites, ...Cuil's technology drills
into the actual content of a page." The New York Times also covered this. I like how Cuil displays results across the screen. But can they get people to abandon Google?
I searched twice for "evidence-based management" on Cuil and both times, Evidence Soup was listed among the top 8 results (hooray!). But it's disconcerting that the summary of the site is a partial quote from my May 29 post The loneliness of the evidence-based manager (see above screen shot). Even worse, the punctuation marks are displayed incorrectly. I'm not sure how they're crawling pages to wind up with this garbled snippet as the description of Evidence Soup.
In contrast, Evidence Soup didn't appear in the top results when I Googled "evidence-based management", though the Wikipedia EBM page I initiated was highly ranked, and one of my EBM-related work projects, Big Tag Labs, ranked fairly high. I thought is was interesting that for EBM, Google lists scholarly results at the very top, along with the number of times each reference has been cited (again, following both the academic and the Google philosophy of assigning authority based on citations):
What about the other 2,827? Maybe I'm missing something, but even though Cuil reported 2,835 results related to evidence-based management, I wasn't sure how to see anything beyond the listings on their results page (I'm using Firefox 3.0.1.). The "2,835 results" text (see below) wasn't a hyperlink, so I had nowhere to go from there. Update: According to TechCrunch, Cuil's performance has been problematic because of all the interest in trying their search engine. Now I am finally seeing a row at the bottom of their screen allowing me to page forward through additional results (screen shot below).
Comments