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Cuil, which can be found on http://www.cuil.com, claims to be a refreshing wind in the land of search engines… A new way of searching, which should be more easy for users, because search listings are automatically categorized.
This all sounds very good, so we thought we’d give it a try… The Cuil-website looks very modern, and seems to be a little inspired by the Google page. The makers of Google always have chosen for a Spartan look for the landing page, trying to set as few links and words as possible on it. (Some weeks ago there was lot to do in the press about Google not willing to place an extra link on the landing page).
Cuil has about the same philosophy about that; displaying as less words and links as possible, the homepage is a black background with a logo and about 3 links. (of which the about-pages was actually not a link, because it didn’t work and showed us a 404-page).
But never mind, a search engine is meant to search, not to tell a fully illustrated history about itself. So we gave the search function a try…
Cuil claims to search about 121,617,892,992 pages (stated on the landing page), which means there is an enormous database behind it. Thing we immediately missed when searching was the option to search only in your own language. (Dutch in our case). We opened the options-page, but there wasn’t the possibility to do so.
Therefore our search for a web designer, gave us several pages to look at, but when we would be looking for a web designer for a rl company, I don’t think any of those would be contacted. This because of all results being pages which origins were spread all over the world.
Afterwards we tried looking up our favorite rock group, resulting in a page telling us that due to the overwhelming success they “would be back soon”… So far for the first test…
Nevertheless we returned somewhat later, trying to search for a packaging machine. (trying to simulate what a company here in the Netherlands could be looking for). We typed in “Palletwikkelaar”, and got only 4 results on the first results page, stating they’d found 1999 results… Way less then Google, MSN or Yahoo finds, and in our opinion also less accurate as these do…
Therefore I think I’ll agree with what they wrote on ZDnet.nl; hadn’t it be better that the people behind Cuil had launched it as a beta? And in our opinion; having it launched a little more modest?
At this moment I will just stick with my old trusted Google, which loads faster, gives a better overview and above all; is more accurate. But I suppose this surely will be continued…
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