| It's all over the news today: some refugees from Google have decided that their new search engine is better than Google.
In my extremely limited experience (I tried a couple of searches), not so much. First problem: it's called "Cuil." What is that about? I mean, "google" didn't used to mean much either, but at least you can pronounce it correctly when you see it spelled out. And why would you choose a name which, when announced on the radio (as it was this morning's newscast), is likely to lead to spelling mistakes?
Anyway, more important is the fact that, at least so far, the search engine turns up odd results. I googled searched my name. The first entry? Wikipedia's entry for Slate editor Jacob Weisberg. I thought that was odd, so I went there to see why it turned up. A BMG post that I wrote is mentioned in the footnotes. That's it. Even stranger is the link to a page that is indeed about me -- but that Cuil accompanies with a picture of some dude I've never seen before. (Many Cuil search results include an image.) So ... that image selector might need a few kinks ironed out. Finally, Cuil's results pages seem to load pretty slowly, in contrast to Google's almost instantaneous page loads.
And all this after $33 million in venture capital! So far, I don't see any reason why the Google gang should be breaking a sweat over the upstart. |
