After publishing the first Cuil post this morning and adding it to my list of semantic search engines, I realized that I hadn’t checked its foreign language abilities. German is the only language I can assess as a native, so I searched for a few popular German terms like Fernsehprogramm (TV guide), Thomas Godoj (German winner of Pop idol) and Bauchtanz (belly dance). Turns out foreign languages might (yet) be its Achilles heel…

First off: Cuil (not quite understandably!) does not know Thomas Godoj, it doesn’t even recommend it as a popular search. Not even his official homepage is listed. Cuil promises to respect privacy – which might mean that it doesn’t even track IPs because the single quality search result it offers is the Thomas Godoj entry in the ENGLISH wikipedia. The selected pictures show pop singer James Blunt and the World Cup Trophy (from 2006 – i.e. before Thomas’ reign) and most search results actually link to video pages where Cuil probably found the most relevant tags as the links read:
video.worldcupblog.org/tags/Godoj/
www.mefeedia.com/tags/godoj/
www.bitdig.com/search/torrent-thomas+godoj/

On to Fernsehprogramm… Continue reading →