Cuil:

Just checked there – vast improvement. I’m a bit of a blabbermouth and have a rare name. How rare? When I lived in Manhattan I was the only Lofquist in the phone book. When I google my name I get a little over 2,000 hits. When Cuil first came out I got close to 300,000 hits. Today just under 5,000. Pretty dumb of them not to account for the circle jerk:

A -> B -> C -> A -> B ……………

On search engines:

I’ve followed the AI stuff for about 45 years. I’ve written programs in about four different versions of LISP. They have made absolutely no progress. They try to sell pattern recognition as intelligence. It ain’t. Flies can do that. Kurzweil has fallen for that same illusion.

A few years back the Japanese invested $5 billion in a database that was to be searched by an inference engine called Prolog. That was a complete and utter failure.

Google just announced that they had cataloged 3 Trillion distinct pages. The problem is NP Complete – totally intractable by any known algorithm.

Chill’un we’re just going to do it the old fashioned way – hard work.