I was intrigued to read about a new search engine, cuil.com, which is being launched by former Google employees. So I tried it out by searching for XULRunner. The top hits were:

• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XULRunner
• http://wiki.mozilla.org/XULRunner:Roadmap
• http://blogs.acceleration.net/ryan/archive/2005/05/06/1073.aspx
• http://chatzilla.rdmsoft.com/xulrunner/
• http://wiki.mozilla.org/XUL:Xul_Runner
• http://developer.yahoo.net/blog/archives/2008/02/flickr-uploadr-open-source-xulrunner.html
• http://benjamin.smedbergs.us/blog/2007-05-15/xulrunner-what-we-are-doing/
• http://www.songbirdnest.com/node/1771

There were also suggested “categories”:

Mozilla

Mozilla Foundation, SpiderMonkey, MozillaZine, Mitchell Baker, SeaMonkey, Mozilla Corporation, Mozilla Public License, Bugzilla

Mozilla Developers

Asa Dotzler, Mitchell Baker, Daniel Glazman, Window Snyder, Brendan Eich, Mike Shaver, Ben Goodger, Tristan Nitot

Mozilla Extensions

ChatZilla, Adblock, Greasemonkey, CustomizeGoogle, DOM Inspector, Venkman, Flashblock, ColorZilla

Netscape

Mozilla, Netscape Navigator, Netscape Browser, The Book of Mozilla, Daniel Glazman, Ben Goodger, Netscape Communicator, Tristan Nitot

W3C Standards

MathML, Resource Description Framework, XSL Transformations, Document Object Model, Cascading Style Sheets, Scalable Vector Graphics, XHTML, … (hidden)

I’m a bit disturbed by the pattern here: a search for XULRunner turns up interesting results, but the primary page on XULRunner (http://developer.mozilla.org/en/docs/XULRunner) is not present. Suggested terms for Mozilla has interesting results, but the most important (Firefox) is not present. The suggested categories are interesting, but the sub-results aren’t relevant to the specific topic I searched for: what I really want is “Mozilla Developers who do XULRunner”.

Is cuil.com built on a strategy of “list all the search results except for the one I really wanted”?

Oh, and a search for “tamarin javascript” turns up 0 results… something must be fishy with their search index.