Apparently Not so Cuil.
Posted by Petrice Gaskin at Jul. 29, 2008
When Cuil.com (pronounced "cool") debuted yesterday, the New York Times and other news outlets and blogs were wondering whether it would emerge as a Google-killer, a search engine capable of challenging Google's search supremacy.
Apparently, Google has very little to fear. The popular consensus seems to be that Cuil still has a great number of kinks to work out. When I first tried to use Cuil its servers were so bogged down with new traffic I had to wait at least four minutes for it to process my query--which is fine. I anticipated that the servers would probably have trouble keeping up with the onslaught of interest. However, Cuil failed to deliver in the nature and usefulness of the results it returned.
When I type "steampunk" into Google the first entry that pops up is a Wikipedia post defining the term, that's followed by a variety of sites that concentrate on the steampunk movement. However, when I type "steampunk" into Cuil the first results page is dominated by entries from steampunk.com. It's results are much less useful and interesting. I'm also not a fan of the UI. The manner in which boxes of text and images are staggered over the page is a little overwhelming to confront. I do like the idea of pairing images with each entry, but ultimately the images associated with each result were not topically related to my search and thus useless to me.
All this is not to say that Cuil doesn't have potential. It does, but they're going to have to work a lot harder.
Apparently, Google has very little to fear. The popular consensus seems to be that Cuil still has a great number of kinks to work out. When I first tried to use Cuil its servers were so bogged down with new traffic I had to wait at least four minutes for it to process my query--which is fine. I anticipated that the servers would probably have trouble keeping up with the onslaught of interest. However, Cuil failed to deliver in the nature and usefulness of the results it returned.
When I type "steampunk" into Google the first entry that pops up is a Wikipedia post defining the term, that's followed by a variety of sites that concentrate on the steampunk movement. However, when I type "steampunk" into Cuil the first results page is dominated by entries from steampunk.com. It's results are much less useful and interesting. I'm also not a fan of the UI. The manner in which boxes of text and images are staggered over the page is a little overwhelming to confront. I do like the idea of pairing images with each entry, but ultimately the images associated with each result were not topically related to my search and thus useless to me.
All this is not to say that Cuil doesn't have potential. It does, but they're going to have to work a lot harder.