Well, for one thing If You Write It isn’t indexed in Cuil except for one entry for a Social Network I don’t even use anymore. Of course, complaining about not finding my own site indexed in Cuil is a bit petty-after all, Cuil claims to be the world’s biggest search engine, not the world’s best search engine.
One of the countless cool things about Google is that it knows we are all idiots who can’t spell-so if I type scie nce fiction into the Google search box, it will ask, did you mean science fiction? Not so with cuil, who flatly tells me there are no results for what I typed in.
Sci fi however gets all kinds of cool results on cuil. Cuil is kind of like a new blog template after you’ve been using one of those one column, one sidebar templates forever. It’s like whoa, multiple columns and tabs at the top-cool. But is Cuil.com really all that much of an improvement over Google.com? The Cuil search engine puts everything in it’s own little box of text, instead of listing then down the page, they are all over the page in seemingly random order.
Are there paid results here? If there are I don’t see them. There doesn’t seem to be anyway to Sumbit an URL to Cuil either. But maybe the paid ads and submit an url features are being held back while everyone oohs and aahs over the Cuil graphics.
Cuil searches for and ranks pages based on their content and relevance-hmm sounds like the same hooey Google and the rest of the search engines like to spout. Content and relevance is how keyword stuffing became so popular-how does Cuil know what is relevant? A few random searches got a few random results. Photoshop brought up a lot of Adobe sites and Worth1000. Boing Boing has several pages worth of results, as does Problogger.
My real world recent search for Beatrix Potter in London got zero results on Cuil while it got 429,000 returns in Google. Rachelray.com puts my If You Write It post on the first page of results for people who can’t spell Rachael, while Cuil returns a handful of odd sites. One of my recent traffic successes was about Jesse and Deanna of The Bachelorette fame-zero results in the Cuil search engine-1,600,000 in the Google search engine.
In short-I don’t see any reason I should give up Google as my primary Search Engine. Seems that Cuil.com has crashed after hitting the top ten in Google Trends and getting slammed by people wanting to take it for a spin. Hard to claim your the best when the best can slap you to the mat without breaking a sweat. No results because of high load-oh well, there’s always Google.
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I just tried it and was not impressed. First of all the print was so small that anybody from middle-age on is going to have trouble even reading it. Then I did a search and it said that it found 25 results but only 3 came up. I couldn’t find anything to click to show me more than the 3 and they weren’t even 3 good results.
I’ve tried many new search engines over the years and I am very often impressed. Even though I usually stick with Google, I usually bookmark the others as backup. I think I’m going to forget about Cuil, for now at least.
The quality of the results is shocking poor for this wonder search engine. Glad to see I’m not the only one that thinks so.