The word on everyone’s lips this morning is the bright shiny new search engine, CUIL.
Cuil is gunning for Google. It’s being mentioned as a competitor to Google, more powerful than Google, “the world’s biggest search engine”, and is supposedly created by ex-Google engineers.
It ain’t no Google though.
In my first few minutes of using it, here’s what stuck with me:
First of all, the search results page takes up to 30 seconds to render – when it renders. It hangs about half the time.
Second, if I re-run a search, I get different results. What’s up with that?
Third, it tries to match up images with search results. I searched my own name, “Keith Peters”. Being an egomaniac, I know that others who share my name include Sir Keith Peters, the Bristol Neurologist, and a sportswriter in the UK. So the results show a bit of all of us. But results about me include Sir Peters mugshot, or some dude kicking a soccer ball. Likewise, articles about neurology are slapped with a Flash logo and game reviews have a cover shot of Making Things Move. Fantastic. Remember, results may vary. Refresh often. It’s like generative art for Sunday afternoon artists!
Fourth, most of the results that were about me seemed to be random transcripts of twitter posts via 30boxes, which, when clicked on gave me “Sorry, the page you request could not be found”. Really useful!
OK, in the space of writing this post, the rendering time has picked up. Maybe a momentarily slowdown. But it seems pretty reminiscent of Twitter’s woes – “whoa, this got way more traffic than we expected. CRASH”. Or even worse, that thing that claimed to be better than Twitter, whose bandwagon everyone jumped on for a whole day or two, causing it to FAIL right out of the gate. Hold on, I’ve forgotten the name already…
ah! identi.ca. Had to look that one up! 🙂 That was a quick lifecycle. 🙂
Anyway, unless Cuil has some improvements up its sleeves, I don’t see it lasting too long.