This morning while riding into work with The Civee, a report came on NPR about this new search engine launched today by former Google employees (while The Civee and I drive in to work everyday, we don’t really listen to NPR that often–or as often as The Civee would like).
We started a discussion about whether another search engine could supplant Google both functionally and culturally. I argued no, saying that Google was simple, quick and easy to use. But The Civee chose to take a different approach, calling me out for my “blind loyalty” and saying it was possible for a search engine to be better than Google.
Not wanting to be accused of being closed minded, I tried out the new search engine, called Cuil. I have to admit I was unimpressed.
First of all, the search results come back in a table format (rather than a list). With the page title, a paragraph and sometimes an image coming back with the results, I didn’t know what to check out first. Also, many of the search results were repeated, which was annoying. Cuil presents itself as the search engine for the next decade. But last time I checked, we’re still in the aughts and people still like lists.
However, rather than a misplaced sense of time, Cuil’s biggest offense is what it leaves out. After googling, I’m sorry, Cuil-ing (is that even a word) King Tom’s Kingdom, I got 0 results. Cuil claims to have an index of 120 billion Web pages. I think the Kingdom is a little more prominent than the 120,000,000,001th page on the Web, don’t you think?
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