Is Cuil Really All That Cool?
Monday marked the release of the newest search engine rumored to overthrow Google: Cuil. I gave it a few days to test it out. I waited mostly because so many people were on it that I got too frustrated and stopped searching. As far as I can tell, the SEO world is in an uproar over it, and negative comments abound. I though giving it a solid chance would help…not so much.
Perhaps I’m just a Googler at heart, but Cuil, as for countless others, was a big let down for me. Now that the speed is a little quicker, I’m still not impressed with the search quality. I don’t know what is in Cuil’s algorithms, but the pages they have indexed seem to be older (when I searched for my name a search result came up from a page at my alma mater that I know for a fact was updated – where my name was removed – not less than six months ago.)
The one actual cool thing about Cuil (pardon the pun) is the image links partnered with text links. However, this leads again to their downfall: Rich was telling me just this morning how in searching for his own name, Cuil’s search engine result page (SERP) showed a picture result of his flyte baby picture coupled with a text search result of an article about Rich Brooks, the football coach. Further down the SERP, you’ll find a photo of the Coach Brooks with a story about my boss. I run into the very same problem nearly every time I perform a search…not cool, Cuil, not cool.
So, Google, fear not. I think I can confidently say you are safe through yet another newly released search engine. Mike Moran from Search Engine Guide wrote about Cuil in this blogpost. Moran suggested that whatever site overthrows Google will not be another search engine, but a social network perhaps. I knew one day Facebook would rule the world…or will it be Twitter…?