[Publib] One more message about CUIL

[King, Jamie]

This was posted on another list this morning.

Jamie


-----Original Message-----

For those of you who have more exciting things to do this weekend than 
hide from the heat and surf the web, here's some of the recent news
about 
CUIL in a nutshell:
--CUIL had to take down it's image function over the weekend because the

prevalence of porn-ish images being falsely linked to things was getting

worse, probably due to being hacked.
--Their claim that "cuil" means "knowledge" in Old Irish has been 
thoroughly debunked by Irish linguists who report that it means either 
hazelnut, nook, corner or flies (the insects).  They suspect that the
word 
might have been wrongly chosen because of an early Irish fable in which 
someone ate a hazelnut and found knowledge but they could find no usage
of 
the term as a metaphor for knowledge.
--One of the reasons CUIL searches sometimes result in a great many 
irrelevant hits and miss the obvious hits is because they have segmented

different topics to different servers.  This means you might do a search

on a sports topic and find very few sports-related hits if the sports 
server is too busy or down for example. It doesn't report which server
it 
is searching so you might get different results depending on server 
availability and with topic division among servers the difference can be

very big.

As much of the web/technology-watching news and blogosphere sites are 
reporting, CUIL's launch has pretty much become a laughing stock in that

community.  They suggest that it is a mid-90s style launch, more 
bloviation than anything new of substance.

HEIDI LEE HOERMAN 
SCHOOL OF LIBRARY AND INFORMATION SCIENCE 
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTH CAROLINA, COLUMBIA, SC