Wait a second, I think I can hear Flav in the background: “Don’t believe the hype!”
I read the New York Times article on Cuil, the newest competitor for Google in the search arena. According to the esteemed (read “not so anymore”) Times, Cuil stands a chance to be the next big thing based on the pedigree of its creators. I’m not sure if the reporter at the times actually tried Cuil out, or if they just read the press release, but I think this thing has a very long way to go before it actually competes with Google or even a second-tier engine.
So I tried Cuil out and immediately was quite unimpressed. I had been searching on Google for information on poorly documented C# errors earlier in the day and thought, for comparison, I would give Cuil a shot at the same searches. On both searches Cuil did not provide any of the sites in its first few SERPs that Google had provided me that had solved my issues.
Cuil asserts that they have more indexed content than any other engine. Unfortunately, if you can’t pull relevant results from that index, it is kind of pointless.
I also was interested to see their take on SERP presentation. Instead of the common “Headline, Description, Link” format that most engines present variations on, Cuil presents its results in a multi-column format that gives each result a short paragraph sample of the target link’s page content and a thumbnail size image from the result. This could just be me, but one of the things I do when using a search engine is try to quickly scan the SERP for the content I am looking for. Cuil’s new format is new, and possibly interesting for about five seconds, but it is definitely not scannable.
Finally, there is the name. Really? Here is a suggestion: “Laim.”
I think I, like nearly 70% of all folks in America, will be sticking with Google for the time being.
You can try it out for yourself at: http://www.cuil.com
LOL on “Laim,” Rich!
I searched my own name on cuil (I know that’s “laim” too) and the following was one of the bizarre top results, with its “helpful” descriptive paragraph. Please note that the thumbnail accompanying this result was an XMen comic book cover.
Dead Skin Mask – skin mask surgery, disorder mask …
Crossfade dead skin lyric when you talk to people on the phone – it will show up in your defying nvq only. Skin foot product crossfade was light fitness cellulite in the Middle Ages. It was a dye lyric mask on hit during the recipe hand scarf in London, opening in April 1940 and playing continuously for four years…
http://www.gskincare.info/p71961.html
You know, I hadn’t thought to try searching for myself. One of the results included a profile of someone else (formerly at Slack), accompanied by a picture of yet another person I do not know.
I agree — looks like it needs a bit more work.
This is a piece of junk. It is difficult to scan, and lacks the little extras that make Google useful, such as the “did you mean” function when you misspell a word or phrase.
What is funny to me is the large black field on the homepage. I suppose they didn’t want to be compared to someone else…
Upon further exploration. I will note that the category type feature is nice for some searches. I just searched for a band and the category type recommend other bands of that genera. I have to say, it was accurate.