Aug 05
Cuil – a sad review
I recently tried out the “new” search engine Cuil which supposedly was the new up and coming competitor to Google. Now, I really went into this with an open mind and thought: “Hey, if they claim to be better than Google, they probably have even better features that make my searching and related tasks easier” — well, I was wrong!
Cuil is in many ways a semi-finished project. It doesn’t have superior searching in any way. It actually didn’t even have any relevant results half the time I searched for things.. Things that Google did have relevant results for.
One of the other things that make Google special is their many functions. As in you can use commands like define: and site: , and even use Google as a calculator with support for trigonometric functions and currency converter. Cuil has none of these features!
Also, when it comes to Cuil’s layout, they’ve said that the picture-paragraph thing is there because users should visit websites based on pictures and not “meaningless” text. While I can partly agree with this, they do a terrible job of actually making this work. The pictures shown are seldom relevant and you have a tendency to choose the results with the pictures – yet the real information could easily be on a website without a relevant picture. Text is still the single most relevant thing we search for – it’s why we use the Internet.. so that we can share information.. and text is information.. images are seldom necessary..
All in all I’m very disappointed in Cuil and at the moment I don’t believe for a second that it will even remotely be a competitor to Google…
I’m definitely sticking to Google for the time being.
August 5th, 2008 at 5:55 pm
Hear hear! I couldn’t agree more…
Also the layout of the results, reminds you (or in this case me), all too much of the annoying spam-websites that appear if you misspell a domain name. This might of course also be due to the fact that many of us have been using Google as the defacto standard for search engines, what they should offer, how to present this and how to “format” our search queries.
But but but, I think it is only fair, to mention the one thing I do like about the Cuil concept, or actually two things, categories and “Typing Suggestions” as they call it. Although the actual category suggestions often are bad, it in essence is a good idea, as you sometimes find yourself searching in the dark, not exactly knowing which keyword fits best for what you are looking for.
Also I find it a bit unrealistic, for a small company to compete with a giant as Google because of the need for a massive server park to keep the database up to date. So either they have to limit the amount of data they register, thus making it harder to find relevant sites, or by limiting the amount of websites they can crawl per hour, thus either reducing the amount of websites they can index or the interval in which they are updated. Both of which doesn’t go hand in hand with a “Good search engine”. For that you need a database with a huge number of websites indexed, frequent updates of these, and as much information as possible on each.
August 5th, 2008 at 7:06 pm
It’s hard to imagine Cuil doing anything but incremental changes to what Google’s done. And even that would take years of effort.
Me.dium.com has taken a different tack. We have a full web index, but we change the results based on the surfing activity of our user base (now over 2,000,000). It’s in alpha, but I’d be curious to hear your thoughts. http://me.dium.com/search
August 5th, 2008 at 8:11 pm
I just put up a new review of the me.dium.com search engine. Please feel free to read it and comment.