Cuil sucks big time
If you follow tech related news, you might remember the launch of a "Google Killer" search engine announced last August called "Cuil". Although quite a Google fan boy, I eagerly tried it out hoping that we actually did have a Google competitor on our hands. After all, it was founded by ex-Google employees and had quite an impressive VC backing. On trying it out I was sorely disappointed. It didn’t return logical results and couldn’t find the site I was looking for even if I entered the URL into the search box. Not being a complete luddite when it comes to developing complex systems such as search engines, I thought I’d give it a try in a year’s time or so to give it a chance to settle in.
So I tried it again today. No change. It’s worth heading over there and searching for a few things just for the comedic value. In fact, of all the searches that I tried, the one with the most relevant results was a search for "Cuil sucks". This, is a lesson on how not to spend $33 million.
Incidentally if you are interested in trying something other than Google at some point, I highly recommend Bing from Microsoft. The results might not be as accurate but it does do some things differently which is refreshing and has on a few occasions provided results that I couldn’t (easily at least) obtain from Google. Bing’s video search is also downright awesome — just hover over a video thumbnail and you’ll see what I mean. Also, Bing’s image search is what inspired me to create Fluidr.
