Tired of Google or Yahoo? Have You Heard About Cuil?
A Better Search Engine?
There is a new search engine on the block, Cuil. According to it’s developers Cuil is an old Irish word for knowledge and the developers of this new search application hope you will use it to gain some more of your own. “Cuil searches more pages on the Web than anyone else—three times as many as Google and ten times as many as Microsoft.” boasts their website. I for one like the site it is a attractive looking site with an easy to use interface and a radically different approach to the way search engines like Google and Yahoo display search results.
Crui has some great features such as Drilldown:
“After you perform a search, you may see a panel on the right-hand side that says “Explore By Category” with a list of subjects related to your search. If you roll-over a category, it will open and show refinements related to your search. If you click on one, Cuil will direct you to this additional information. By looking at these suggestions, you may discover search data, concepts, or related areas of interest that you hadn’t expected. This is particularly useful when you are researching a subject you don’t know much about and aren’t sure how to compose the “right” query to find the information you need.”
Crui also offers Roll Over Definitions
“When you pause on a subject suggested by “Explore By Category,” a definition of that term may appear. This gives you additional information to help you decide whether or not to click on that term and so save you some time.”
One of my favorite features of Cuil was the option at the bottom right of the site that allows the user to change the way the page is displayed, either two columns or the default of three columns may be chosen at any time.
The only thing I noticed that wasn’t all that hot was the way images are associated with the search results. The matching definitely seems off to me. I noticed that images that do not pertain to the search are sometimes associated with the search results.
Take my upstate NY web design company Engines of Creation.com. If you search the term “Engines of Creation” we will show on page one on the search results (not to hard with that targeted of a search term) however, the image associated with my company is the Joe Satriani album cover “Engines of Creation”.
All in all, despite a few minor bugs I think Cuil is a winner. Whether or not they can stand the test of time or can afford to battle the market shares of Google or Yahoo remains to be seen.
Perhaps Microsoft can buy Cui out…
What did you think about Cuil?
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Karlonia - Power Quotes | August 4th, 2008 at 4:39 am
Apparently Cuil was not quite ready for launch during the first day or two - many medium long tail queries did not return results at all, and even general queries returned way fewer results than they should have considering Cuil’s claims of having indexed so many pages already. They did improve somewhat afterward, however, and seem to be picking up more results and increasing relevance as more people have been testing out the engine.
In the long run, I hope they get things together and perform well enough to compete with the major search engines and then maybe do some advertising. I would like to see more serious competitors to Google in order to hold their power in check and encourage more transparency overall.