Cuil ain’t no Google, right now
There was some noise on FriendFeed yesterday afternoon, about the new search engine on the block, Cuil (pronounced cool). There was enough noise, that Read Write Web wondered How Did Cuil Get So Much Publicity the answer in pedigree ex-Googlers with IBM’s Web Fountain and Altavista background.
So like many others, I went and checked it out, and like most bloggers the first search was a vanity search, “Nick Cowie”. The result where okay, this blog home page came up first, but there was also 6 other entries for this blog on the front page along with my jaiku, claimID, RedBubble pages along with that web sledging video on viddler. The next page had a few more blog pages, my twitter page and a couple of comments I posted on Richard Rutter’s blog. It took until the third page before the unfortunate scotsman who shares my name got a guernsey, which is the same as Google. I must admit the quality of the results where much better on Google that Cuil. Though I did find the Cuil results page interesting, though I don’t know how long I could cope with the three column magazine inspired layout.
Some of the more interesting conversation on FriendFeed focused on the images that Cuil was displaying next to the search results. I was disappointed, I had no images related or otherwise on my search or any search I did, for the next few hours.
It appears that the initial publicity had delivered an incredible volume of traffic to Cuil, so they did not return images with search results and some of my searches returned no results, even when trying to display a third page of search results. After a few hours it returned to normal and Cuili started displaying images with search results. The images of my vanity search did not related to me, even though there is enough of them out there.
So was the hype worth it, no. I love Cuil’s privacy policy, like there search interface and results page, but the ranking of the results leaves a lot to be desired by me and the images are just unrelated eye candy. Interesting start now lets see what develops and hope for a Google challenger.