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.