New Kid on the Block

A new internet search site Cuil (http:www.cuil.com) has lauched. They claim to have indexed 3x's the number of pages as google and 10x's as many as live.com.  Impressive numbers, but I'm not sure they have it just right yet.

First off, they have some dead links... yea i'm not talking about their search results... i'm talking about pages off thier "information" section http://www.cuil.com/info/ of the cuil website... oops is right guys! If you want people to think you got your shit together and that you can compete with Google... probably should have your site figured out and locked down... and I don't know... working, before you launch.

Secondly, I'm not sure if this is some cool feature of the search, but they have what seems like mostly random images associated with their search results. Like... why is there a photo of direction on how to hook up a washing machine (or what looks like a photo of a dog sled race) associated with a dead link to what is supposed to be an Eve Online mining guide (an online video game)? ahhh what?

Thirdly, I have no idea how the results are ranked... or how current they are. Maybe this is a function of my Google paradigm... but I like to know how results are ranked in relation to each other. So is the result at the top of the 2nd column more relevant then the 2nd result in the 1st column? If not then why is the 5th most relevant item pushed off the page, while the 10th most relevant sits at the top just to the right of the #1 result? I'm not saying its bad... but it is confusing, because I don't know what is going on.

Fourthly, and this is mostly a personal thing. Even though they have indexed 3x's the number of articles they seem to be missing a few. Namely, THIS website. A quick search on Google for "schwerzler" puts this site: Schwerzler.com at the top of the search results. Cuil doesn't even have schwerzler.com IN its search results.... I mean come on... it is IN the domain name. Rest assured I like being the #1 search result for Schwerzler on google, but I don't need to be #1... I do however expect to be included in the results for schwerzler. Maybe in the 121,617,892,992 (as of 11:24 AM July 28th, 2008) pages they have indexed has not brought them to schwerzler.com yet... but Google found us... and ranked us highly relevant to people looking for information about "schwerzler".... just sayin.

The site claims that Cuil does search in a new and exciting way... but i'm not sure how they expose that to the user, and the site being unable to provide the information is not helping much either.

Hopefully they will adjust after the release and we will see some cool new search technology coming from Cuil... they seem to have some talented people, now lets see what they can do.