Many people have wondered what exactly Cuil Theory is, and where the word Cuil came from to describe and rate sufficiently WTF posts on the internet. The purpose of this post is to describe where Cuil came from, and what exactly it means.
Cuil.com is a search engine that came out last year, and who’s claim was that its search index was “bigger than Google’s search index”. In search terms, it meant that the Cuil.com had more pages in its search reference than Google, which they claimed would make it better than Google.
Well, of course the internet jumped at the chance to compare a new engine that claimed to be better than Google. So the masses descended on it, myself included, and discovered some very .. disturbing.. issues with the search on cuil.
The problem was: every search you made was supposed to also return a picture that was related to your search, as well as stuff that was loosely related to your search terms, but what it actually did is peppered your search results with hardcore porn pics and stuff that made no sense at all in relation to your topic.
An example, you search “War of 1812” and you get a picture of some midget strippers in WW1(?) outfits beating a guy, and some links to horses on Wikipedia, and maybe a Chinese restaurant that opened in California on July 4th. No where in your results would there be ANYTHING about the War of 1812, much less anything even loosely related to the war of 1812.
I think they have kinda fixed it since then.. but the results were so NSFW and illogical that it was easy to see there was no way cuil.com was going to be better than google, even if their search index was bigger.
Well, the internet took the word cuil and created “cuil theory” where WTF posts are assigned a cuil rating according to just how WTF they are. It is common to see “2 cuils” as a reply to a comment that makes you sit back and say “what the heck did I just read..”
In order to further enrage the internet with elitist talk, the people at cuil.com decided they needed to define how to pronounce their name, which is supposed to be pronounced “cool”. you can pronounce it however you want though, and I actually pronounce it “coo – oil” , like coil with a long O sound, just so it is clear that the cuil creators are failures at everything they claim.
It is one thing to say you are better than Google, but it is another thing entirely to BE better than Google. Right now, Google is still the best at search, in my opinion.
