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Comment by russell | Hacker News Reader

HN had a posting about "postmodern programming" a couple of days back, so I thought I would give it a try. Google found at least 10 pages of documents, Yahoo a bunch, even answers.com found a couple. Cuil? Zip, Nada, zero. I guess I won't switch.

EDIT: My bad. Apologies to Cuil and HN. I had a typo in my query. Cuil didn't catch it, but Google suggested the correct spelling when I gave it the typo.

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Umm I just tried that : http://www.cuil.com/search?q=%22postmodern+programming%22

It returned 516 results for me (when including quotes in query).

Without them too.

Live.com can hardly get any traffic and their search works. I had high hopes for Cuil but gave up when it became clear that their search results were simply bad or missing. They should have held a closed beta for 6 months.

What's your reference for saying that live.com can hardly get any traffic?

http://www.alexa.com/site/ds/top_sites?ts_mode=lang&lang... has them at #4 (which seems unbelievable but definitely past the bar of very high traffic sites)

Look up the fraction of search traffic they get compared to Google (or even Yahoo) - and the ad revenue they can generate from it.

Plus they must get a decent amount of traffic from mistyped URLs in IE - I've ended up at live.com a couple of times while trying to test some XHTML/CSS/JS in IE.

Isn't Live.com actually composed of gazillion sites? I think Alexa counts all subdomains together.

On Wikipedia there are listed more than 50 subsites:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Live

With many of these being used directly from Microsoft desktop software, it wouldn't be so unbelievable for Live.com to be #4.

I suppose each user has his own preferred torture-test search terms. For mine, Cuil has recently (but NOT at launch) returned a better set of results that does Live.com. But neither wows me enough to pull me away from Google.

try duckduckgo

Why? I already know about Wikipedia and Yahoo.

It has its own crawler, it only uses Yahoo when it can give you good results.

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