There has been much in the way of ‘hype’ surrounding the search engine Cuil, but I’m struggling to see anything close to interesting about this whole sordid affair other than the 4 original developers have all at some point been employed by Google. And unfortunately for Cuil, unless there are some seismic reassessments of their aim as a Search Engine, that’s exactly where the Google parallels will end.
My Firefox home-page is set to BBC News, and every morning I will read the Technology section with keen eyes, seeking out any developments either by or affecting the search market, (and the occasional post of purely personal interest,) so when, one morning recently the leading story had been put up with the headline: Search Site Aims To Rival Google, I’m sure it will come as no surprise that I wee’d myself a little. It’s the equivalent of a Premiership footballer falling in to a deep vat of dangerously young girls, or Duffys’ record label giving her the green light to write another album of horrifically crap wankery, or me watching Fern Cotton dying painfully…anyway, this was the kind of headline you can wish for, but never truly expect to see. So I read the story, became intrigued, and went to test out Cuil.
Now, I remember one Christmas really REALLY wanting a mountain bike, and getting a pair of green corduroy trousers instead, so this is perhaps the second most disappointed I have ever been, but try it for yourselves, and form your own conclusions. It’s not the worst engine I’ve used, but a serious rival to Google it isn’t. I’m a more serious rival to Google, and as you’ve probably figured, I’m human, albeit a poorly assembled one.
To save me the rigmarole of ridiculously detailed critiques, I’ll resort to the age-old tactic of statistics, 90% of which are made up anyway:
- Aesthetics 6/10 - Its’ best point, but trying too hard in fact
- Functionality 2/10 - My personal opinion is that semantics are for people without the intelligence to know what they are looking for in the first place
- Relevance of Results 0/10 - It’s insane, i think it must genuinely randomly pick some pages from its all too boasted of 120 billion index
That is truly the most damning statistic of them all. I could go in to huge depth about no-one having an allegiance to Google, and how all we want are the most relevance results, but I suffice to leave it there for the sake of the hernia thats been growing in the process of writing this.
Lets allow the results to speak for themselves. Given that my personal site did not appear in their indeces, I searched for “submit URL cuil” (without quotations), and the results were fascinating, completely irrelevant, but fascinating. Furthermore, it returned only 7 results! What happened to that 120 billion index? Googles’ minuscule index returned me a paltry 35,700.
“Cuil” is supposedly the Gaelic for “wisdom”, and I’m obliged to report that this shambles of a search engine clearly think we are not as Cuil as we merit.