Jumped on the bandwagon and tried out Cuil today. The verdict – more development time needed.
1. Result counts are wrong
I searched for the (rare) name of a friend and found 3 results. The search engine counter said 4 results were found.
2. Duplicate content
I searched for the bizarre phrase ‘fell in outhouse’. The first 3 pages were nearly identical results. For a time I wasn’t certain I was really changing pages.
3. Named after a Salmon
Apparantly ‘Cuil’ is a gaelic word referring to knowledge and hazel – they talk about a salmon of wisdom. I’m not sure how that sits with me…
I chalk up the high server load and weird results to the infancy of the product and expect that it will improve over time. The column interface is sleek and attractive. The results clustering appears to be advanced although similar to WebFountain.
Right now, though, I don’t understand why Cuil is being touted as the next generation search engine that will replace Google. The press coverage and their own site confuse me as to whether the big deal is the size of the search catalogue (apparently 3x that of Google) or the fact that the company’s leaders are made up of former Google employees.
Time will tell, but as of launch today I don’t see Cuil becoming my default search provider any time soon.