A Cuil new “search engine”

nice, stylish interface

I was about to write a post on “cuil” (pronounced cool) the new search engine created by former employees of google, when I came upon this post at MoneyManagement’s Weblog.

It is a comprehensive review, so I won’t try and duplicate the effort in detail. But here’s my quick summary on two key factors for search:

1. Look and feel – Great! Minimalistic like google, but that’s where the design similarity in ends. Cuil is very stylish looking in black and blue, a sharp contrast to the undesigned appeal of google.

The results show up in nicely designed columns saving you the bother to scroll. Overall, it’s a great UI experience.

2. Results – It’s fast in coming up with results. Especially when showing “no results were found” for say, “Mehernosh Shapoorjee” which throws up 93 results on Google with 90% being true to the real McCoy.

To be fair, it showed 1.091 results for Noshtradamus, of which 90% were real results and what I was looking for. Google throws up 1,010 with 90% relevant results. Both results were almost identical.

My reading is, for popular pages and search terms, the results are almost identical between google and cuil. But on less popular ones, the difference is huge, the odds of you finding what you are looking for better on google.

But now here’s a killer observation:

google vs cuil - on cuil!

“Search for Cuil on Cuil, and you get 121,578 results – with the cuil search engine itself not showing up on the first page.

Search for Cuil on Google, and you get 886,000 results, with the Cuil Search engine almost filling the first page results – homepage, info, reviews, youtube video, et al!”

But as search engines go, I guess it abilities will get better with time. I wish Cuil all the best. And hope it doesn’t disappear like a dozen other search engines that came and went over the years!

Read the complete review at MoneyManagement’s Weblog here.

ps. I am a die-hard googler. Using it at least 10 times a day, and have google set as the home page on all my computers.