I am all for competition by creating new and innovative ways to perform common and standard tasks. Given the current state of the search industry with few serious contenders, the prospect of one major player partnering with the other one in specific areas and the possibility of that search engine’s sale to another, the announcement of a new guy on the block is a big deal. So, when news broke of the launch of a new search engine called Cuil with the potential to stand with the likes of Google and Yahoo I was there, ready to give it a go.
Of course, I was a little skeptical at the news but put my preconceived notions aside to give it a fair shake. For all I knew it could be everything it was hyped to be and more. The only way to find out was to try it for myself, which I did.
After playing around with this new search tool my first impression is rather mixed. I can’t say that I am disappointed but I can understand why a lot of others are. Disappointed is a strong word for me in this case; it denotes an attitude of final judgement that I do not want to convey. I prefer to say that it has potential. I think it does, although it will take time and tweaking to get there.
It looks different, no doubt about that. Like many others who have opined on the net, I was a little put off and disoriented by the layout of the search results. We are all generally accustomed to lists of links and content clips that are easy to scan and scroll from top to bottom, with those deemed by the search engine as most relevant listed on top. The results of a typical search on Cuil are spread across the page in a combination of titles, descriptions and pictures that at first glance (and for me continuously, if I stare at the page for awhile trying to sort out the sort order) appears to have little or no hierarchy in terms of search relevance.
I suppose one could get used to it over time and in an odd way it does seem more aesthetic, however if there is a logical order or relevance to the search results I just didn’t see it on the searches I did. In fact, I looked at eighteen pages of one set of search results that had over a million hits and found that many of them were nearly complete duplicates of previous pages, which was very confusing and more than a little annoying. The redundant listings of entire pages was a time waster for me, especially given the fact that each page was somewhat slow to load. I ended the search with the notion that if it wasn’t on the first two or three pages, it wasn’t worth checking further.
Of course, the very first search I tried was The Force Field. Type The Force Field in Google and the web site www.theforcefield.net is usually at the top of the search results. Type it in Yahoo and you get the same. Search it in Dogpile and it is in the top four. Cuil ? Not even directly listed.
Now, it’s only been around for a couple of days and it takes time for search bots to scour billions of pages on the web, so I didn’t exactly expect Cuil to list it in the top ten. But the hype was that Cuil was already the largest repository of indexed pages on the net, claiming to be much larger than Google. So I expected at least one page from The Force Field dot Net to be listed in the search results. I searched through numerous pages in the returns and it wasn’t there. Yet several other sites that were generally lower on a Google or Yahoo search were listed right there on the first page of listings in a Cuil search.
Now, there were listings for other sites that referenced or linked to The Force Field and The Force Field podcast, quite a few, in fact. There was just no direct listing for the home page of the site itself.
Okay, they didn’t list The Force Field. Hey, it’s not as if we’re a big company like Microsoft , is it? Well, it might as well be, because during another search session I typed in Microsoft. Guess what? There were numerous third party references to Microsoft and Microsoft products but a link to their home page, which I would expect to show at the top of the first page, wasn’t the first item displayed, as I would have expected. The links to the website were there but some of the titles didn’t seem to match the search query. Mixed in were seemingly irrelevant entries to other sites with no apparent relation to Microsoft. I mean, this is Microsoft, one of the most universal household names and one of the most high profile web sites in the world. Just another listing on a targeted search? Now, that just isn’t natural.
But that was only a minor bug for me. The real annoyance was not the listings themselves but the other items attached to them – the pictures.
For every search I did, the results returned included site links accompanied by pictures that were completely unrelated to the sites. For instance, I did a search for The Force Field in search of a link to www.theforcefield.net and the same pictures kept cycling through on the listings. None of them were related to The Force Field podcast or the web portal. Few of them were actually related to the sites they linked to.
I then ran a search for The Force Field podcast. This time there were a few hits for the show, but again, the same unrelated pictures, none of which were actually connected to the show, the site or the sites that referenced or linked them. This was just plain weird. The concept of a more graphical search is nice, however it is somewhat confusing and a bit annoying when the pictures don’t actually represent the page listed or anything remotely connected to it.
Now, my initial foray into Cuil was not at all scientific nor was it organized. I was just another user searching the web. But then, isn’t that a real world scenario for using a search engine? If searches like mine are normal, what can we normally expect based on the results I experienced?
I know I sound too critical and it isn’t my intention. I am just reporting my first impressions of Cuil. Overall I like the concept and the layout of the site is something that, while unconventional for me, is something I could probably become accustomed to and possibly prefer over traditional formats in time. However, I do think it needs some work and a lot more tweaking to get it to the point where it becomes a serious contender for the search market. It’s a great concept, I just don’t think it’s there yet. Before we pass judgement on it, we need to give it some time.
This is an ambitious project and I wish it success.
Have you tried Cuil? Have you had a similar experience with it or do you get completely different (good or bad) results? What do you think?
