Is Cuil Cool?

The layout sucks, the search results are unimpressive. I don’t think Google has much to worry about.

The search found our kennel website, but I have no idea where they got the apartment block picture from. Sure, our dog runs are nice, but not that nice.

This will die a quiet death when people stop paying attention to how much it sucks in comparison to established search engines like Google and … wait… there are other search engines besides Google that are worth a damn?

Some people still care about Yahoo and Live…some even care about Ask. Why, I don’t know. As an SEO I can’t stand Google’s monopoly of SE’s, but as a user, I just think they give the best results and the best user experience. People that try to kill 'em seem to miss those points…

I typed in my organization’s name and after 16 pages of results on Cuil, there’s not one related to us. Google brings it up as the #1 result. Based on a browse of the page of results (100 per page), I’d say a good 80% of the first 100 results on Google deal with our organization directly (either our own website or articles and news on other sites). Now, why would I go back to Cuil after that type of result? It doesn’t matter if you are new or not, if you don’t offer a better product, there’s no point in switching.

Searching for myself, I mostly found WoW-related pages. Not relevant!

Nope, in all the tests I ran today, none of Cuil’s results were anywhere near relevant to what I was looking for. [sigh] This is a worse POS of an engine than MS Live.

It finds choggle pants. Not sure if that’s a good thing though.

John C. Dvorak hates it because it doesn’t find his blog.

As The Register reports, try searching on Jonathan Grattage. Even with safe search on, the second item’s image is perhaps not exactly what Dr. Grattage might hope for.

I’m not sure why everyone seems to want them to fail so badly. Considering that this is a day one release while Google has been refining their search engine for the best part of a decade, this seems like a pretty good effort so far to me. I like the interface too.

People said the same thing about Google vs the incumbents when they showed up. As for why it is a good business plan - if they are successful in building a search engine that comes anywhere even in the ballpark of attracting a tiny fraction of a sliver of a slice of the search market, their company will be worth billions of dollars. Seems like a decent reason to me.

It depends on who their target is. If they want me, personally, to stop using Google and start using them, then they have to be returning better results than Google right from day 1. It would be crazy for me to just start using something inferior for no particular reason than to “support the underdog” or such.

If they’re after the business end of the market, selling search services and hardware and such, then that’s something where they might be more competitive on things like price even with results that aren’t as good. But I’m not personally going to care about that aspect of it, and right now they’re just a new kid on the block among a bunch of other competitors. They still need to distinguish themselves in some way, and quality doesn’t seem to be it.

I don’t want them to fail.

However, they’ve opened up what they’re doing to public scrutiny, and want or not, they are fucking failing. Objective failure.

They are failing to convince me, and it seems many others, that their search engine is worth using over not just Google, but most of the existing engines. They are failing in many cases to even be viable search engine.

I want them to fail for picking a name with no obvious correct pronunciation. Technical quality aside, if you have people that terminally clueless running things, they deserve to crash and burn.

Yeah, that was a pretty bizarre choice for sure.

I suppose we can look at Cuil as being ready to compete in a year or two and then when we check it out it’ll actually give better results. But…if Google is giving the results you want/need, how is Cuil going to give better results? That’s a long way to go.

If it IS to compete with Google, it’ll take many, many years. Look at Yahoo and Live. They’ve been up for 2-3 years now apiece at least, and neither can really hold a candle to Google’s relevancy of their results. These guys have a long, long uphill climb ahead of them…

Now if they were trying to compete with, say, Ask, I’d not be as negative. ;)

That’s not how I remember it. Google didn’t burst out on the scene in a frenzy of hype and VC funding to take on the big boys, it grew organically as a research project. By the time your average web user had heard of it, it was already IMMEDIATELY obvious to even a casual observer that what they were doing worked far better than what others were offering at the time.

In any case, my ultimate problem with Cuil is that while google isn’t perfect, cuil doesn’t address any of the pain points of using google. Nor does it offer anything novel and useful that would convince satisfied google users to switch. While it does have a fairly nice web design (IMO, YMMV), I still prefer the ultimate minimalism of google because any sort of design, even a nice once, just gets in the way of what I’m trying to do when using a search engine.

Also the name is really lame.

Google tells me cuil means knowledge in Gaelic.

Cuil is a chunk of crap. My sites aren’t even listed properly on it and looking up “Hellgate Guru” turns up an image of me. Why me? I have no idea. That particular image of me isn’t even present anywhere on the main page and is buried somewhere deep inside the forums. How they managed to dig it up, I have no clue.

Veronica Belmont noted on her blog that her own website isn’t even indexed by Cuil when she looked it up.

Even Yahoo, which stinks (apart from its Flickr image search) gives better and more accurate results than Cuil.

Yeah, it’s safe to say that I’ll be sticking with Google.