Austin360 blogs > Digital Savant > Archives > 2008 > August > 04
Monday, August 4, 2008
Review: Cuil.com
This article ran in the newspaper on Sunday in Life & Arts. In case you missed it, here’s my review of Cuil.com:
New search engine leaves users looking for the logic
It doesn’t happen often, but sometimes a wave of hype in the tech world culminates in a product that lives up to expectations: the iPhone, for instance, or most HDTV sets. What happens when something feels dead on arrival the moment its out of the gate? Meet Cuil.com.
The new Web site, launched last week by ex-Google and IBM engineers, has been hyped as a new way of searching with a much larger index than the king of online search, Google.com. Cuil.com’s home page says it has indexed 121.6 billion Web pages.
But is bigger any better? Given Google’s popularity, you wonder whether Cuil (pronounced “Cool”) is trying to solve a problem that doesn’t exist. Are people that unhappy with search engines like Google, Microsoft’s live.com and Yahoo, among others?
Unfortunately, Cuil.com is not cool: It’s a disaster.
For a while on Monday, the “About Cuil” page on the site couldn’t be found when you clicked on it. When a search engine’s own pages can’t be found, you know there are major problems. The fundamental function of the site, to help you find things online, seems completely broken. A common search that almost everyone has tried at some point, my own name, returned a frustratingly long set of results that didn’t quite get it right. Instead of finding my name among hundreds of American-Statesman bylines, my work blog, my personal blog or any number of other places where my name appears, Cuil.com instead showed an IMDB entry where I have one credit, several audio and video interviews I’ve done for other sites and other “not-quite” pages, sans images.
Contrast that with Google, which pulled up my most relevant sites immediately among 64,700 results. Yahoo, live.com and another visual search site, viewzi.com, which provided not only results from Google and Yahoo, but YouTube videos and photos I’ve posted to Flickr.com. Here was the dealbreaker: a “Texas Longhorns” search returned this: “No results were found for: texas longhorns.” What!? To be fair, several tabs on the Cuil.com screen provided suggestions “Texas Longhorns Football” and a search for basketball. But even that first page of Longhorns results showed the UT Co-op, a scouting site and orangebloods.com, not the official site, texassports.com. Google, on the other hand, returned 3.59 million results. The top result was texassports.com.
An air filter I bought a few months back with a weird product number, “Hw-Fc40r1029,” was not found at all by Cuil. Google, Yahoo and Viewzi all found it. Live.com found it when I changed the search to “Honeywell Fc40r1029.” Cuil.com did not.
Is Cuil a bust? I think so. It simply doesn’t work well. Will it get better? Probably. There’s an option to send a message to the Cuil.com team when your search yields nothing. By then, you’re probably gone.
Cuil, unfortunately, is not nearly cool, or functional, enough to be worth your time in its present form.
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Live chat with Omar about Twitter, 11 a.m. Monday
In case you missed it, here’s Sunday’s Life & Arts story about tips for using Twitter.
You can see the Monday live chat transcript below:
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