Back in high school, I was still getting the hang of the internet. Sure, I had my favorite sites, but there was no one specific search engine that I regularly used. I started with Yahoo back in sixth grade, as its name was synonymous with Internet, it seemed. Later, when arriving to full-time internet in high school, I used Alta Vista. I remember asking Tony what search engine he used. True to form, he wouldn’t tell me at first, claiming he didn’t want to slow down his searching experience with additional traffic. But eventually, I learned that Tony used Google, a site I was not familiar with in 10th grade. Soon enough, I switched and have never gone back. I like Google’s results, which I trust; their interface, which is clean and simple; and their philosophies: they’re a company I trust, more than I trust any other internet-based firm.
Today, news sites seem to be all afire about a new search engine, started by former Google employees. It’s Cuil.com, pronounced “cool” (and evidently an old Irish word for knowledge). From their info page:
Rather than rely on superficial popularity metrics, Cuil searches for and ranks pages based on their content and relevance. When we find a page with your keywords, we stay on that page and analyze the rest of its content, its concepts, their inter-relationships and the page’s coherency.
Then we offer you helpful choices and suggestions until you find the page you want and that you know is out there.
But in using it for a few searches today, I’m not impressed.
1. Ugly!
They display search results in two or three column layout, meaning my eye ended up all over the screen to see what results it had returned. And I wasn’t sure how they results were ranked. Maybe they weren’t at all, which would make me turn to Google even more. Plus, they use a black background for their home page, probably to set them apart from Google, or something. Frankly, I find light text on dark screen to be unusable – unique, but unproductive.
2. Unreliable Searching.
Lauren tried a search for “gymnastics”. She got a “nothing found” page. I got the same results when searching for “Michael Braun” (note the apparent narcissism from me). I tried hitting the refresh button and lo and behold the search works! So it’s a bug, but what a ridiculous bug! I would immediately go back to Google if I was doing a legitimate search.
3. Questionable Results.
Searching for my own name, on Google my blog comes up on page 4. When searching on Cuil, I’m not on page 1 or 2. I tried to check out page 3, but the search engine gave me that same unavailable page. (Just tried again: now they say that they are down because of overwhelming interest. Yawn.) Also, they claim to index way more pages than Google does, but on that same search, Google returned around 161,000 results, while Cuil only returned 83,280.
Part of my bias against Cuil is because I’m such an ardent Google supporter. But if they don’t clean up their act, start returning relevant results, and stop going down every 2 searches, they will never live up to the hype that they are getting from the media.