I’ve just returned from this English teacher workshop and one of the many things I learned through Erik’s WebQuest presentation was that there is a new search engine out there called ‘Cuil’. Now, I’ve played around with it a little and must admit it looks pretty interesting. Similar to Google, Cuil has a very clean interface without any distractions and clatter. What’s different is the way Cuil present its search results. Rather than listing the links of web pages, Cuil displays short texts along with the links so the result pages look a bit like a newspaper.
Erik also told us that Cuil was founded by former Google employees so this project might be quite successful. One of the indicators of its popularity is that some the Cuil pages have already reached PageRank 7!
Anyway, how cool do you think is Cuil?[YSaerTTEW443543]
TOEIC listening, photographs: A crowded room[YSaerTTEW443543]
I haven’t found myself using this search engine, but I doubt it will gain as much popularity as Google as its name is far too complicated to remember, in my opinion.
Hi Torsten
I think it will be interesting to test it and compare it with Ms Google.
Hi Molly
The idea seems reasonable enough. However, there are apparently only 221 words currently, so I don’t see how it can be viewed as a useful tool at the moment. I’m actually a bit surprised that you liked it since it appears that register categorization will rely heavily on native-speaker intuition – and haven’t you stated on a number of occasions that you don’t trust that?
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Oh, so the register aspect is not the part you find useful then. (That does seem to be the main point/goal of the site though, doesn’t it.) Were you trying to suggest it as a handy dictionary instead?
I listen and read very well.
The way that site seems to work is that basically anybody can go to the site, input a word and then assign a register to it. Thus, the register information for any given word is likely to be the opinion of one single anonymous person – probably based primarily on that one person’s intuition. And who knows – there could even be words that end up being categorized based on ESLese intuition. :shock:
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Nothing wrong with having personal opinions and using one’s intuition as long as one is ready to be challenged or found incorrect. You don’t seem to take either of those easily. Here you go again ranting on because at least one person on this forum advises using caution when using or listening to native speaker intuition.
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I have posted some observations – based on what I found at the site. Did you find something different there? Why not tell us how you’re planning to use the site? After all, you’re the one who posted the link to it.
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Why would you imagine that discussing that which one finds on Cuil is off-topic? Such discussion can show the capabilities of the engine regarding language study, which I guess is interesting to some, here.
