Have you heard that a group of former Google employees just launched a new ‘revolutionary’ search engine that they claim is better, deeper and more effective than Google? Gutsy, for sure. It’s true, and you can read about it HERE. It’s called Cuil.com (Pronounced “cool”) and the Internet is abuzz with chatter about the product.
I was excited to check it out this morning and have to say I am not sure if I dig it. The initial aesthetics of the site are pleasing – similar to Google, except a full-black background. The design itself probably much more sophisticated than Google (not that Google strives for sophisticated design) but the results of the search were a little difficult for me to digest. It could be that I’m so accustomed to seeing the results in the format that Google spits back at me, but I just wasn’t feeling the multi-column results.
That said the article discusses the benefits of this system over Google – mainly that it searches a database of as many as three times the amount of Web pages that Google does! If that’s factual, it’s pretty impressive. Could it be that this product is actually better than the Google search engine?
I’m not sure, but as I mentioned, the design ruins it a bit for me. The way it reports results is a bit overwhelming and I’m not sure I know what to make of them. It also seemed, initially, that it brought up many more irrelevant results for a couple of searches I did.
What do you think?
Garret Ohm
http://www.orange-element.com
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For many reasons this doesn’t work and at best it will have a tiny following:
1. Branding: Let’s start with the name. Why make a name you can’t pronounce. At least Google was easy to pronounce.
2. People like to see relusts stacked. It gives them a sense of importance.
3. The pictures are just thrown in anywhere. I searched Branding Company and came right up but right next to me was a Futurebrand logo. It looked as though that were my logo. Very confusing.
I’d love to see a legitimate challenge to Google, but I spent about fifteen minutes with Cuil yesterday and came away frustrated. Some obvious searches came back with no results, while others would return pages of results but only have one be accessible. It also seems to disproportionately weight commerce pages (i.e. Barnes & Noble and Amazon).
I have a hunch that these were just early technical glitches, but they don’t bode well.
Cuil got whipped good by the bloggers in the past day. Thus I think it will succeed. I read somewhere they’re backed by $30MM and some very smart people.
The initial launch fumbled, but the search results do present information in a novel way, and one that focuses more on the content inside articles vs. the linking-game going on outside of them.
I wouldn’t rule Cuil out yet.
I like the layout, and if they start to get more relevant results, I could see myself using it.
However, they don’t have the rest of what Google brings to the table (gmail, maps, readers, docs, etc) so I don’t see my homepage changing any time soon.
Well it’s been ripped pretty good by the development/advancement research community. The basic opinion is that it’s just not up to Google’s standards yet.
Some of the comments I’ve seen:
“I entered a few sample searches into it, and unfortunately it returned little to no relevant data.”
“…Cuil (at least as of today) does not offer a spell-check feature.”
” I didn’t see the ability to search cached pages :/”
“I checked out http://www.cuil.com and was disappointed. I tried several searches and did not receive the variety or relevance of results I received on either Google or Yahoo!.”
“My short take is that it’s not ready for prime time. That also means I’m willing to give it another chance in a month or so.”