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.
I too am an ego-maniac (also because I’m the only Joel Kirchartz in the history of mankind) and decided to search for myself … Cuil lists that it found 3500 entries for my name in quotes, google only notes 125. So Cuil must be better because it has 28 times more entries for me. Unfortunately, Cuil only gives me 7 links. Google gives me the full 55 (if I ask for omitted entries) Cuil however doesn’t have this functionality. Cuil’s only getting hype because it has gradients etc and looks all “Web 2.0” which means nothing if it doesn’t have the functionality.
I tried it as well and came to similar disappointing results. I wonder if all the hullabaloo is just that people yearn for competition in this area. It made Drudge which is kinda weird for an unproven start-up.
Oh well, I like Google though. Maybe they’ll be challenged one day – but that ain’t today.
my luck:
We didn’t find any results for “Keith Peters”
Some reasons might be…
* a typo. Please check your spelling.
* your search includes a term that is very rare. Try to find a more common substitute.
* too many search terms. Please try fewer terms.
Finally, try to think of different words to describe your search.
Weird. I’m getting 10,365 results, quotes or not.
I’d have to agree about the images. Not even slightly relevant to most items I have searched. Why include a feature out of the gate that just doesn’t work correctly? That’s a FAIL.
I search engine that returns incorrect results? Sounds like a flop to me. ;( Right out of the gate, no less?! Shame! … maybe their QA team is/was on extended vacation?
Haha! “Try to find a more common substitute”. How do you substitute Keith Peters?
Anyway, I’m not having much luck at all with this site:
Safari can’t open the page “http://www.cuil.com/”. The error was: “Operation could not be completed. (kCFErrorDomainCFNetwork error 302.)” (kCFErrorDomainCFNetwork:302) Please choose Report Bugs to Apple from the Safari menu, note the error number, and describe what you did before you saw this message.
“Umm, I tried to open http://www.cuil.com/” LOL BIG MISTAKE
OK, I got it to work on a refresh, and well, I googled myself as well. For some reason this image keeps coming up: http://www.cuilimg.com/imgsrv?i=02110a:1353500894759300
What gives?
What makes Google stronger than its competitors is the library called MapReduce, and also the file system called GFS, as well as the database called BigTable;
I too am an ego-maniac and searched for “Keith Peters.” Shocked by the results if you turn off “Safe Search.” Oh my!
I think new search engine competitors are always a weird breed. There will always be someone else saying they can beat the Google machine, but for the most part, what makes Google good is its simple interface for complex actions. CUIL definitely missed that one. The panel layout is over-whelming and hard to read. Whatever though, I used to use Webcrawler, then Altavista before Google, so maybe there is room for another?
i totally agree with your review, this morning reading the paper i saw the article and as soon as i got to work , i looked it up, the first thing i tought was, i takes too long
Cuil is just too hard to use. The non-linear format, while it looks sweet, has no future. How do I see what’s more relevant to my search?
The interface is beautiful, but horribly poor usability. I like the newer looking interface, the colors are less harsh on the eyes than a pure-white background.
These people worked at Google… so you think they’d understand what works and what doesn’t, right? The concept is sweet, but miserable execution.