So, how cool is cuil.com? Not very. For those who don’t know what Cuil is, allow me to explain a little. Cuil.com is a search engine that launched yesterday amid a whirlwind of publicity. Cuil employs some past Google folks and was touted as the Google slayer. Unfortunately, I think they bit off more than they could chew. Cuil had major bandwidth problems yesterday from the flood of traffic they recieved. Their servers just couldn’t keep up. I appluad their back-end folks for doing some awesome load balancing and never allowing it to return a 203, 204, 400, 404 or 500. They always had something up there, even if all it said was something to the effect of “found no results.”
So, what’s so un-cuil? The results. Take a look at this screenshot of the results that are returned for a search on “seomike.” Do you see this site anywhere? Nope. The only result on the page that is me is the DMOZ profile. That’s pretty sad. Oh, and I’m pretty sure the dude from the 1700’s isn’t SEOMike either. Another thing about the results is the organization. There are 11 results on the first page, some with pictures some without, all of them jumbled together. I suppose the first result in the first column on the left is the most relevant to my search, but where do you go from there? Down or across?
Lastly, with it’s current index, Cuil returns garbage results. Most commercial searchers produce result after result of Chinese and Russian scrapers and irrelevant results. Cuil.com fails the most crucial test of a search engine; quality results delivered in a concise manner.
Overall, Cuil.com has a long way to go to become a market contender, and it takes a lot to make up for a poor first impression. I hope they get their act together soon!
