I’ve been following Cuil since I first heard about it from Search Engine Land . I, much like everyone else, was very interested to see if a well-funded start-up that was backed by some of the original Google engineers could muster enough competition to give Google a run for their money. Everyone loves an underdog.
But after Cuil launched and I had my first few peeks into the search engine, so far I’m unimpressed.
Format & Usability
Let’s start with the format of their search results page. What’s up with the newspaper article format? A search results page with a jumble of quadrants.
Users have been conditioned to expect search results pages with the top 10 search results listed in order of relevance. Although I’m open to accepting new experiences and new formats, you shouldn’t mess with over 13yrs of search engine usability. It’s much like selling a new car with the steering wheel in the middle of the car, it’ll work but it doesn’t feel right.
Relevancy & Geo-Targeting
I’ve found the relevancy & geo-targeting of their search results to be off.
For example, when searching for popular terms such as “ford cars” although I got a page of search results from official ford websites and ford dealerships, it also displayed “.co.uk” results. Which is really not relevant to me since I’m located in North America.
Another example is when searching for “george bush”. One of the search results was for the GOP . Yes, George is a republican, but presenting me with the GOP website just isn’t relevant. I’d expect news results & blogs as well as official political websites.
Not sure if they wanted to launch in the midst of the Microsoft/Yahoo search merger talk. Or if eager investors pushed them to launch earlier than planned. But I think Cuil was a great idea that needed to simmer a bit more before being served up to the public. A little more R&D as well as a few rounds of usability testing would have really gone a long way in terms of improving this fledgling search engine.
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