Cuil - The Review Continues
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Trying to figure out where Cuil is going to make an impact on Google’s market share is difficult at best. Fully realizing that it is still a work in progress, I cannot help but feel like Mahalo is going to see a more significant impact on how people search than Cuil. With Mahalo, you know what you are getting and you are not trying to pin it against Google - it’s a completely different type of thing. They have defined their market and are doing very well with it. Cui, not so much.
No, Cuil is still trying to find its land legs it seems. And what is worse is that should the search engine manage to find its missing link, because it will likely be automatic like most search engines, Google will undoubtily be able to replicate it on Google Labs within a year or so anyhow.
The idea of a search engine based on relevant content is a great idea, but thus far is appears that the one based on popularity is still producing more relevant query results. And that is truly unfortunate for those using Cuil at this point.
6 Comments
Matt McCarty
July 29th, 2008
at 1:01pm
Yeah I agree that Mahalo at this point is cooler than Cuil, bad joke I know. I like how with Mahalo its people who populate the lists.
Engineerdude
July 30th, 2008
at 5:41am
I tried Cuil a couple times and it took so long to even show up in my browser that I gave up on it the last time. I did do a couple searches and cuil found nothing while google found multiple real active links. I tried it but I’d rather actually get the information I’m searching for.
James Duchek
July 30th, 2008
at 9:08am
I think Cuil has a VERY LONG way to go. I always test a new search engine using “Martin Luther” (the 16th century German reformer). Some years ago I used to get a heavy mixture “Martin Luther King” references along with what I was searching for. Now Google recognizes the difference (relevance) and produces mostly legitimate “Martin Luther” sites without having to resort to Boolean logic, subtracting “King” from the search. Good job Google!
Not so good (in fact awful) with Cuil. “Martin Luther” yields almost exclusively sites relating to the 20th century civil rights leader. Adding a (”-king”) to the search gives a nothing found message. Terrible job Cuil!
Another Google contender, Mahalo, does much better. It produces a nicely categorized list of site plus helpful sidebar information. Great job Mahalo.
If I were one of the former Google engineers involved in Cuil, I would be embarrassed to say the least. Lots of work remains for the Cuil team!
Gerry Vrbensky
July 30th, 2008
at 11:07am
I’m not impressed. When I searched for my website “St. George’s Tennis Club” on CUIL, there was no listing. If I Google my website, it’s at the very top of the 1st page and that statues takes years to get.
Rick
July 30th, 2008
at 1:51pm
In my testing, I received fewer and less relevent hits for my searches than I’m accustomed to with Google. I’ll give it another bunch of tries in a week or so to see if it improves.
How the heck is Cuil pronounced, anyway? Is it like “cruel” without the “r”? Or is it like “kill”?
Roelof
July 30th, 2008
at 6:05pm
@Rick: From what I’ve heard, Cuil is pronounced exactly like ‘cool’. Hence the (quote) bad joke by Matt McCarty.
What it all boils down to is search results of course. So I tried Cuil with two of my own sites. Both are in Dutch; one is about a (now defunct) shipping line and the other about housing renovation projects in the neighborhood where I live. Both sites turn up in the first results on Google.
To test Cuil I used the most obvious search term for both sites. The results were not very encouraging. The shipping line did turn up in first position, but with a reference to a page where some document pdf’s can be downloaded. Not the best entry point for the site. Why not link to the index?
The other site could not be found at all. And this with the name of the neighborhood (that I used as the search term) frequently showing up in articles and posts. Talk about relevant content! What Cuil *did* find however were many old posts on a local news weblog. Often on topics that are hardly relevant anymore, and sometimes on topics that my site has much more about.
Yes, this really is embarassing. Things can improve of course, and there is plenty of room for improvement, but at the moment Cuil is worse than MSN Search in its worst days.