7 bizzare Cuil search results - beats Google for humor
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Much has been written about Cuil over the past few days since its launch. Most of what has been written has been negative primarily due to Cuil’s very strange results thus making it next to useless as a search engine. I want to say let’s embrace Cuil’s oddities and enjoy them. Hey, how do you know that Cuil isn’t really just the first ever joke search engine?
So here are my seven favourite ‘joke’ search results from Cuil…
1. the queen - Number 1 result is ‘The Queen Movie’ (picture) which i’ve never heard of. Second is ‘The Queen of Clubland’ which is interesting because personally I wouldn’t have thought her more important than THE Queen who only features at number 5.
2. batman - Hilariously, the top result is for ‘Batman: The animated series’ but with a Netscape logo as the picture (see picture). ‘The Dark Knight’ comes second but that doesn’t make up for the Netscape logo.
3. apple - Here Cuil does well (kind of). First result is Apple. Very strange picture though. Even stranger however is the Wikipedia article in position 9 which is the article about the fruit apple with a picture of what seems to be a 1930’s big band (picture).
4. football - An important test. Here Cuil brings ‘The National Football League’ as the top result. In fact ’soccer’ only feature first at number 3 and then for ‘Cambridge United Football Club’. Hmph.
5. olympics - The ‘Internation Olympic Committee’ is returned first but there’s no mention of the 2008 games on the first page. Of course the 2012 games are there and oddly even a page about the 1936 games (and 1998 and 2004).
6. microsoft - The first page results (apart from 1) are all Microsoft pages but number 5, www.microsoft.com, has some blurb about QuickBasic (not QBasic apparently) with a picture of a Microsoft Windows Server 2003 book (picture).
7. the pope - Probably the strangest of them all. The top result is a link to www.vatican.va and the blurb explains that .va is the country code for the Vatican City. Most odd though is the picture - its a DVD box but I can’t tell what film it is (picture). If anyone can, please let me know!!
UPDATE: Tim Peckham has emailed me and informed me that the video (next to the Pope result) is ‘The Pope of Greeenwich Village’. According to Tim ‘it’s a very good movie’. IMBD tells us that it was made in 1984, stars Eric Robert and the plot centres around ‘Charlie and his troublesome cousin Paulie [who] decide to steal $150000 in order to back a “sure thing” race horse that Paulie has inside information on’.
I’m sure you can find more. Post them in the comments and I’ll add the best into this post. Meanwhile, here’s a recap of other Cuil news from around the web…
Recap of Cuil News
Cuil Launches - Can this search startup really beat Google? (Search Engine Land)
How to lose your Cuil 20 seconds after launch (TechCrunch)
Do not mistype Cuil (TechCrunch)
And…Cuil goes offline (TechCrunch)
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The film is The Pope of Greenwich Village.
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0087932/
Ah, Cuil - truly the Monty Python of the search world!
Useless for search, great for a laugh.
Indeed John! I enjoyed it. Nice Cuil article on your blog by the way.
Is anyone experiencing the same as me where when you search for ‘Google’ or ‘Gmail’ the results appear and then disappear?
Is this part of some anti Google tactic?
Visitors to Cuil’s site over the first few days of its public launch would have thought the site was created in jest. Since then, things have improved, but haven’t most people already moved on?
I know I have. The damage has already been done.