Cuil Was Not Cool Enough

Posted by Mamun Ahmed in Technology on 16 February 2009 | one response

When I first read the news about a new search engine called Cuil [I thought the pronunciation was Keewool], apparently bigger and better than Google, I could not wait to see what it in it. What it is going to bring in its search result?

The first thing after going to Cuil home page I was disappointed. It just did not make any sense, why did they use the dark theme? None of any popular websites have a colour theme like this. Some minor sites have this colour theme but most of them are for link exchange, illegal downloads, full of pop ups and somewhat with adult materials [did I mean BDSM?]

Cuil claimed that, it indexes about 120 Billion WebPages, but so what? If someone search for “Best pub in London” and if it brings some 50 thousand result, who is going to trawl through all of them? Being big is not necessarily a better thing. An Elephant is also big comparing with a Dog, but an Elephant is no where nearer to a dog when the question of security arise. OK, lets put it in different way, I need to buy a vehicle to go to office every morning. I would not buy a bus or a van to go to office, I would buy a car or if I am a bit more adventurous I would buy a Motorbike.

One of the fundamental flaws with Cuil is, it is not clever enough. If an user misspelt a search term it does not understand. Instead of telling you the right term for search, it brings thousands of result based on misspelt terms. This you can find out how many webmaster misspelt the tags but id does not serve the purpose of searching. While I am writing this article I have done a search on “Barck Obama” [misspelt] on Cuil, Google, Yahoo!, Live and Ask. All of the search engines suggested that I have misspelt the name, but only Cuil failed to tell me there was a misspelling and top of that it brought me 146,009 results. Which is not very clever for a search engine at this time. [see pictures below]

Also, Cuil presents the search results scattered all over the pages. After searching something the first thing anyone will see a page full of box, box, box. Not easy on eye at all.

However, lot of internet users appreciated at the beginning after seeing a rise of potential rival of mighty Google, perhaps some of the Analysts smelt end of Google monopoly but it is a disaster for a much hyped search engine so far.