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Cuil Is Clearly A Non-Starter

Friday, April 24th, 2009
by Matt Hartley

I have used a lot search engines over the years. Most have been pretty bad while some have been generally usable. Before Google, I was a big one on using Yahoo, as it “sucked” the least at the time. Today, Google remains the leading king regardless of how many other “meta-search” engines attempt to gain a piece of Google’s pie.

At one point there was a lot of hope for a search engine called Cuil, as its developers had hoped that their own unique search algorithm. Sadly, after using it myself, I found it to be too busy for daily use, often not providing me with the content I was looking for and generally a “meh” kind of experience. Google on the hand apparently manages to work because it is not trying to reinvent the wheel after striking gold during its own creation.

While there is always work to keep black hat SEO types from manipulating it, the original formula of ranking based on who likes or links to the page in question, is clearly showing the what the people want. It may not be perfect, but for whatever reason, it is clearly demonstrating that there is a need for some human control for accuracy along the way in the quest for search engine salvation.

7 Comments

Brad Kellett

April 24th, 2009
at 4:25pm

Just wanted to let you know that we’re working incredibly hard to improve our results and the user experience on Cuil. We’ve only been around a year, Google has been doing this for over 10, these things take time.

If you have any suggestions, get in touch. We love hearing feedback!

Matt Hartley

April 24th, 2009
at 9:13pm

Hi Brad,

This is fair - I will give you guys the spotlight in today’s IT Professionals post coming up later. Will work it up with “what we would like to see from Cuil. That way, we can share constructive feedback.

This will give you neutral “airtime” in addition to what others are wanting to see come from you folks.