Not so warm for cuil

The top technology story on the bbc today was a new search "rival" to google. I was going to dismiss it, but I caught the line where it said it is developed by former employees from the big G.

The name of this new search engine Cuil , pronounced Cool means knowledge in Gaelic, but who cares, is it any better than good ol' google?

First thing I noticed when I entered the site, was the blackness, in contrast to googles white nothingness. Also it took a few moments to come up, I think it may have come up with a loading screen for a second.

I searched for this blog randomconsultant and it didn't have it listed. That was slightly disapointing, as their crawler technology is suppose to be better than google's. But hey it's their first day and this is an little known blog.

But Cuil does claim that it searches more pages on the web than anyone else - three times as many as google and ten times as many as microsoft.

I then searched for something more likely, like the firm I work for. That did come up and the thing that stands out is that the search results were in two columns and each had a little thumbnail. Some of the thumbnails didn't really match the result and there were too many results for pages from the same site.

On the right it had some categories.. but pratically speaking one wants their search engine to contain what they want in the first 3 hits, who cares about other categories. I remember dogpile.com(use to collect google,yahoo and other searches) had a similar thing but I never used it then.

The results didn't come up that quickly too, which maybe because the whole web wants to check out a possible google killer. In fact Cuil and cuil.com are number one and two respectively in the hottest Google Trends list (i.e. the most searched for keywords right now) . I am sure google love that.

The search technology cuil uses is suppose to be a lot more sophicticated than google. Instead of just looking at which pages link to what like google does, it also looks at the context of the page and probably other stuff.

I will reserve complete judgement for now, until cuil has a bit of time to crawl the web, but I can't see anything now that will really trouble or make me and others want to switch their homepage.

Maybe in the future, when I am searching for some obscure things and google is firing blanks, and cuil comes up trumps maybe I will switch, but right now I don't think anybody will be in line to jump out of the windows at google hq.

STOP PRESS:

Just tried going to cuil.com and I got this message

"We’ll be back soon...

Due to overwhelming interest, our Cuil servers are running a bit hot right now. The search engine is momentarily unavailable as we add more capacity.

Thanks for your patience."

As the US starts waking up looks like they are on overload.... wonder how long people will use it... maybe for the novelty factor... or mayber it will be just "cuiler" (ok that's bad) than googling!