Wednesday, August 13, 2008

Not as "Cuil" as Google

By Julie Tangen
I've been testing out Cuil...If only its product worked as well as its marketing! With weird search results, a strange service architecture, misplaced images, and the name itself working against it (I heard a guy on the radio pronounce it as "Quill"), Cuil’s launch was less than stellar.

While I love the idea of a newer, hungrier search engine, my workload became increasingly difficult using Cuil because I couldn't find accurate references to the things I need to do my job. In fact, most of my searches resulted in nothing useful at all. Also, the style of content layout (with thumbnail inclusion) is not to my liking. Call me old fashioned, but I've grown accustomed to Google's simplicity. And it works so well that some of us probably take it for granted. If you want to rekindle your ‘Google Love’ I suggest trying Cuil for a day (or even just 5 minutes). You’ll coming running back!

I’d love to hear from others who have checked out Cuil—what was your experience?

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

I was thinking that coool.com might have been a better name/URL. But that URL is taken (online shopping). As is cooool.com (real estate), as is coooool.com (for sale!), as is cooooool.com (porn), coooooool.com (coming soon!), cooooooool.com (Pokemon?), coooooooool.com (Asian). Cooooooooool.com (ten o's) is available, however. Yea!

-Tony

Anonymous said...

Sadly, it looks like - at least in the search engine department - Google is going the way of Microsoft and Apple (aka: world domination, or at least more than their fair share of brainspace!)

-Erica

skaheru said...

The first time I heard of Cuil I thought the Irish had launched a new beer. Google is it, frankly, for the same reasons you mention (simplicity, familiarity, and so on). Cuil needs to do more than marketing - update the pages.