Cuil for School

Last week people started talking about Cuil, a new search engine with ambitions on taking on Google’s own search service. I guess it’s about a week after the PR machine swung into action and I can’t help but feel that the public’s enthusiasm is wavering from what wasn’t exactly the warmest reception in the first place.

Google has a monopoly that has not shifted in spite of the money Microsoft and others have pumped into creating their own rival search engines. Cuil came from nowhere. It has some innovative ideas such as being black and displaying results in a number of columns across the page. It also implements suggestive text (something that Google offers as Google Suggest, but this is not a default feature on it’s main search page).

For a moment ignoring the accuracy of Cuil’s results, the features that make it different haven’t exactly been heralded as ground-breaking. There was a ‘black’ Google around some time last year, which was an environmentally-aware site that argued in displaying a while screen, your monitor used more electricity: so a black screen uses less power, thus saving the planet’s resources given the number of people who would usually display the white Google pages. People soon realised this was a false argument, and ended up forgetting about the whole thing.

I really don’t like the results in columns.  It’s not how I look at information. I can see that by doing this, Cuil can display more results on the screen without the user having to scroll, but when I read listings, whether it be in a search engine results page or the classified ads in a newspaper I will read top-down. Cuil wants me to read along the page and then down. This makes information harder to see and is more work for the eyes.

Cuil is also missing the nice features Google has. If I search for ‘Time now in London’ on Google it will tell me immediately. The same as if I were to type ‘Weather in Sydney’ or any one of an array of searches Google regognises and answers without me having to leave the results page.

Although the most important part of the search engine is the accuracy of the results. Cuil seems to provide pretty accurate results on some occasions but has some spectacular failures. Most notably Cnet’s Buzz Out Loud Exec. Editor, Molly Wood searched for herself on Cuil to find that the photo attached to her biography in the results is of a completely unrelated woman who is a good thirty years her senior.

If I were to stop using Google today and force myself to use an alternative, Cuil would not be that alternative.