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Blog Entry
New Cuil Search Engine Sucks
Published on the 4th of August 2008
A few days ago there were posts all over the blogosphere about the new Cuil (external link) (pronounced "cool") search engine that was suppose to "take down" Google. Apparently, Cuil was founded by an old Google engineer with knowledge about their search algorithm and Cuil was going to produce better search results than Google. It took about three hours for everyone to figure out how much Cuil sucks. The search results are not even close to relevant, especially the random images they somehow associate with the search results. When I searched for "Ethan Poole" I got some completely irrelevant pictures that had no connection to me at all.
My favourite commentary about the new Cuil search engine is in this episode of the Buzz Report (external link) by Molly Wood of CNET.
Basically, you cannot beat Google unless you simply have better search results for everything. Sure, Cuil has a cool interface and a massive search index (or so they claim), but their results are utter garbage. It is possible they could improve on their search results to match up with the attractive interface, but they are a long way from even challenging Google.
Comments
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Tom (external link) (4 Aug 2008 15:49)
Agreed. I really liked the interface and the way the search results are organised in columns. Actually that's a lie, the whole column thing was not that easy to read
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Matt Oakes (external link) (5 Aug 2008 4:13)
There was a good editorialon Ars about why no one will overtake Google anytime soon: http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20080803-opinion-can-google-be-bested-not-anytime-soon.html
Basically if a search engine is any good it will get brought buy one of the big three before it becomes really popular.
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