cuil – another search engine

A few days ago i blogged about scour.com – a new search engine. I now have it as my default search engine in firefox.

I think it’s a very promising search engine which is gonna take a hammering for being seen as a ‘paid to search’ ‘scheme’. People don’t understand that it’s an added incentive to use scour – it’s not the sole reason why you should use it!

Anyway, enter cuil.com – a new search engine set up by some ex google employees. I don’t like it.

The results are annoying… It messes up the order of results… for example is smemon.com ranked no.2 or no.5 for ‘smemon’. The owners claim the column look is to make things easier to read – i think it looks like a mess myself. Rather than read results in order (no.1 no.2 no.3 etc…, my eyes are all over the place – there’s no sense of order.)

The thumbnail images are going to be useless unless webmasters can change them. (In the FAQ’s it says they use “advanced algorithms to determine the best image to show the user” – that really clears up that then 🙄 )

Thirdly, no image or video search? *ouch* that gunshot through the foot must be painful 😎 Come on, this isn’t 1999.

Ok, on the flip side there’s no scrolling. Apart from that, it’s a backwards step for search imo. I blogged about scour and how they were changing search for the better with social style voting systems to organize search results.

Cuil is just the same old stuff rehashed in a different layout. It’s nothing to get excited about, it lacks a community feel and why would anyone use it? What does it do differently? NOTHING.

Having more indexed pages than any other search engine isn’t a selling point. That doesn’t make cuil attractive – if anything it hurts it. Google could easily index more pages but they don’t as the majority of unindexed pages are spam.

The future of search is people power. Human powered results is the next step forward. Scour is the first real attempt at that, cuil is nothing more than a google clone which fails to capture the imagination.

Looking at a few of the comments around the web, it appears i’m not alone in thinking cuil need major work. The actual search results are dodgy too… relevancy seems to be an issue.

This is no ‘google killer’ – they have the media wrapped around their finger – i’ll give them that. But it’s all smoke and no fire.

Anyway, looking at the bigger picture, google must be getting a little hot under the collar… for the first time in a long time, there are now some serious attempts to put a dent in google’s monopoly. It means people are realizing google ISN’T untouchable and that there’s also a lot of people out there willing to jump ship to another search engine for one reason or another.