Cuil has been a stealth search engine for quite some time; comprised of a few ex-Googlers, the new search engine is supposed to deliver the most relevant results and is supposed to run more efficiently on the back end.  There are a lot of things that make Cuil different, so let’s get right into it. Unlike most search results that you may be familiar with across the web, Cuil returns a 3 column results page.  I decided to do a search for my name to see what would come up.

cuil search jacob morgan

What’s interesting about this result is that my blog page doesn’t show up, yet my twitter and linkedin profiles do, not quite sure how this is more relevant than Google’s search result but…ok.  Chris Brogan and Louis Gray have the same problem.  The index is apparently over 12 billion pages, myself and many others just happen to not make up that index. There are a few things I do like about Cuil such as their tabs and drill down by category.  Both of these can been on the Cuil feature page, or you can try doing a search on something yourself.  Funny thing is that the drill down box does not always appear, for example, doing a search for Jacob Morgan did not yield any category drill down box. The advanced search commands that Google offers also come in handy, for example the “intitle, inanchor, allintitle,” etc. commands.  No word yet on whether or not Cuil will support such commands. Cuil still has a lot of cleaning up to do and in fact has recently been the topic of the tech industry for it’s somewhat botched attempt at a launch, check out the screen I got when doing a search for my name.

cuil error page

I still don’t know if I will be using Cuil especially since I am so used to the Google search results.  When launching a new product or service that offers “different” results, it’s a bit harder to gain traction when people are already used to a particular way of doing something. So is Cuil going to be a Google killer?  Eh, not yet, is it cool?  it could be, once they clean up their index a bit and put in a few missing results 🙂  I know it gives “different” results but come on, when someone searches for their name it should show up dontcha think? What do you think of Cuil?

Thanks for reading check out these articles on Cuil as well

The official Cuil press release

Cuil on Techcrunch

Cuil shows how to launch a search engine (webware)

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