"Cuil.com" - Search engine display of photos!!!

I read today about some ex-Google employees starting their own search engine..."Cuil.com" (pronounced "cool"). I went over and gave it a whirl...

I first did what I sometimes do in Google...typed in "Eastern Screech Owl Photo", to see how my site ranks. What do I see?

I see "ShutterStock" come up...with MY PHOTO displayed next to the search results!!! I do NOT provide photos for ShutterStock, and never would.

I look, and no, ShutterStock doesn't have my photo. This is ALL a "Cuil.com" problem. At least it's a problem to me. I did some more searches, and OFTEN found MY PHOTOS being shown...in conjunction with other people's websites!! And where my website pops up, if there was a photo, it was NEVER mine, always someone elses.

It seems Cuil.com has some weird, semi-random method for popping up images on search results pages. I don't know about you, but I do NOT want MY photos popping up on search results for another website, as if they're promoting that site!! And I certainly would like it much better if it were actually MY PHOTOS showing up in conjunction with my website!!

Someone else, please, give it a whirl and give me some validation that I'm not just seeing things!!

From my searches some of the photos tied to the results are from the site and others are not. It's rather disorienting actually. Thanks for posting about this. I'll be keeping a closer eye on this.

Yeah that looks pretty misleading and I can understand your concern with a microstock agency name tarnishing your own images. I'll keep an eye out on this too.

I tested the search engine with my site and found a similar issue. I'd suggest if it bothers you enough to do something about it, I'd write Cuil and let them know about your concerns. Further, you can write and request your site not be included in their index. And even further and more extreme, you can block their crawler from your site completely. Unless the search engine takes off, I think the last two methods you shouldn't worry at this point about losing traffic. If they want to compete with google though, they really should boost their speed and usability (when I tried it took almost a minute to fully load the page, and even then there were missing links).

I found it was really messed up. I was sent to link that were blocked due to containing malicious software as well as a couple of porno links. Interesting, they had links to pages that I had changed nearly a year ago. They also had many links to my dis-continued site. I would be worried if anyone knew about them. I sure didn't until I read this thread. If they stay this bad, I don't think anyone has a reason to worry.

That site is a mess! Many of my photos were coming up associated with other websites as well.

It is a small consolation, but at least my photos re appeared to be associated with well known photographers and not shutterstock!

I do have the same experience. My sitename with pictures of someone else or the other way round.

The results were like Alphabet Soup: Lot's of pieces but few real words. I looked up the college where I work and it amzed me that suddenly the school had changed its long-standing logo! Strange, indeed. The pages loaded slowly because of all the images, I think.

I'll stay with Google, Gargle, and Giggle until this is sorted out.

-P

Their site is a mess. They're blaming the result issues on a huge spike in traffic. See Cuil shows us how not to launch a search engine . I wrote up a little more about my experience with Cuil on my blog in case you're interested.

I tried again tonight to see if they had improved. I expected that they had not. Ifr anything, it is worse. Of the half dozen links I tried, half tried to load an anti-virus software on my computer. Cancel and clicking on the X box resulted in it going ahead with it's attempt to install the unwanted software anyway, probably a virus itself. This is not even an alpha release! I'm with Preston, I'll stay with Google!

I've checked more too. Not only do the search results stink, but the way it's displaying the mis-placed photos is laughable. Seems that if you do a search and see a particular image associated with a search result, if you go to the next page of results, that same image will appear in the exact same spot, next to a different result!

And I have YET to find any of my site references actually using one of my photos on the results, and every time I DO see one of my photos, it's someone else's site.

They really should have waited. Even if their interface and search capabilities prove to be superior in the long-term, putting it out like this is going to sink them.