Experience with Cuil

Cuil, the new search engine seems to be a big buzz on internet this week. This is mainly for two reasons: One, they claim to have indexed more web sites than Google and second that it was developed by ex-Google employees. Even with these claims, I feel the search engine poor to Google or other competing search engine. The only stand out being the way they display search results. Here is my experience using cuil.

Starting with the name “cuil”, which is pronounced cool, does not sound good! This might be very personal comment and might sound irrelevant compared to other experience I had. Google has become an english word we commonly say “I am going to google it”. But “I am going to cuil (cool) it” sounds little wired.

Leave apart the silly issue, I found cuil delivering me irrelevant data and redundant once. My first test on the search engine was to search for my-self! Interesting thing is showed me pictures of someone else. It also to me to an explicit site when safe search was turned on! Regarding the redundant results entries, the engine displayed the same entries on far pages.

Other issue with the engine is that they do not have much of a preference. You can only can only turn on/off the safe search and typing suggestions. There is no search by file type, date, etc.

Major advantage is how the results are displayed. On searching “java programming”, the engine provided me an accordion on exploring by categories. But it’s sad that cuil do not suggest word if you miss spell!

So, what do you think? Can a product developed by ex-Google employees be so badly written? Or is it just the beginning of a new search engine? Because Google was not built in a day!