Cuil is the new kid on the search engine block getting all the attention of the technorati but its going to take something really special for anyone to even get a look in at being able to topple the mighty Google.
On first impressions it looks nice and the eco friendly black home page is neat and simple. There is auto-suggest feature which responds well as you type in the search box with the plus point of actually performing the search when clicking on one of the suggested items straight away. The search results are presented in a tidy 2 or 3 column page (depending on preference) with an extract of content from each page alongside an image thumbnail.
The minus points then came out in the test searches I did which did not seem to yield the most useful results. An ego search for themadhiker pulled out some random pages where I have postings and comments, nothing unusual there and pretty much as I expected. My second search for “.net developer forums” totally failed and suggested I may have made a typo or used a term which was “very rare” which was not impressive in the slightest. I tried something a little easier so started typing London and the auto-suggest popped up London UK which is what I wanted. The first few results were for an international money laundering conference in London, wedding cakes made by Franziska and a site about business language training. Now I don’t think I’d be out of turn in saying that these are not exactly the types of results one would really want if they were looking up information about London.
Reports that the site has been struggling to stay up doesn’t bode well either. As Buzz Out Loud’s (CNet’s podcast of indeterminate length) Tom Merritt and Molly Wood reported the site was slow to return results or sometimes not getting results at all.
It could take sometime for this to work properly as the product evolves and reliability improves but in these days where Google still dominates search on the web, anybody who is venturing into this space has to do so with a huge bang, and this is merely a pop on the search engine spectrum.
Filed under: Musings | Tagged: cuil, google, search engine
