Cuil Search Engine

28 July 2008 461 views No Comment

On Monday July 28, 2008 Cuil, a ‘big new search engine’ launched their search technology to the public. This new search engine was developed and ran by the husband-and-wife team of Stanford professor Tom Costellow and former Google search architect Anna Patterson. They are hoping for faster, bigger, and better search experience than Google…Duh - Every search engine is!

My View

I have used the new search engine and I’m honestly impressed with their design efforts! I really like the search layout: A picture with every website, term suggestion with tabs, three and two column navigation through results, ect. However, I’m not too impressed with Cuil’s Search Results. Some are even saying that Cuil shows us how not to launch a search engine, which is pretty rough if you ask me.

Developers decided not to run Cuil through beta because according to Sollitto “The product was strong enough to launch.” But they still showing errors when loading their ‘About’ and ‘Privacy’ pages!

Personally I can see both sides of the story.

Cuil’s Side:
“We’ve only been live for twelve hours,” Sollitto said and traffic has spiked beyond their expectations. In other Web 2.0 launches, a traffic spike would slow down or crash the service, but in Cuil’s architecture, the spike affected results, not speed.

“We are trying to give people different results.”

Searchers Side:
Why not run your new efforts through a beta?
Why not prepare for the worst?
Why launch something to the public when its really and honestly not even showing any relevant results.

Cuil is definitely showing different results alright - the ones we don’t want to see!

It will definitely be a hard road to tow when going against the huge search leader Google but I wouldn’t say its impossible! Almost though.