Just because it’s Gaelic doesn’t make it “Cuil”
I trust my life with Google. I must use at least 5 of their products every day of my life from Gmail, Google Blog Search, Gtalk, Google Maps, and Google Earth (which I must say has a come a long way from its beta to now having Street View integrated). Everything they make is so well thought out, easy to use in a non-pretentious-like-Apple kinda way and, best of all, it’s free. How can you beat that?
So why then is somebody trying to steal my sweetheart? Apparently some ex-Google people got together and decided it was time to challenge Don Google, but what they’ve come up with is the search engine equivalent of a well-dressed Paris Hilton stepping out of an overpriced and tool-ridden nightclub: all style and hype but no substance.
Cuil claims that it:
searches more pages on the Web than anyone else—three times as many as Google and ten times as many as Microsoft.
and that:
Rather than rely on superficial popularity metrics, Cuil searches for and ranks pages based on their content and relevance. When we find a page with your keywords, we stay on that page and analyze the rest of its content, its concepts, their inter-relationships and the page’s coherency.
Pretty bold, blanket statements seeing as how it gives results that look like somebody threw a deck of cards at you. But I digress. I’m really not a pessimist but with all the hype surrounding Cuil, you’d think the final result would be even remotely better. I do, however, like the clean design and colors of the interface. It’s like an Ikea without reheated meatballs. Ultimately though, I can’t see anybody using this current vaporware unless a major set of features are added to its interface to even put it in Google’s rear-view mirror. And even then, imagine what Google would be up to by that time.
But I’m also thinking Cuil might not want the role Google oh-so-nicely plays. What if they’re just aiming to rethink the search engine aspect and not worry about killer-apps and a complete digital ecosystem in the longhaul? It’ll be interesting to see if Cuil can really shake some multi-colored tailfeathers, but then I think of AltaVista and Lycos…wa wa wa.
Tags: cuil, google, search engine
You can comment below, or link to this permanent URL from your own site.