Cuil: The Cool New Search Engine - Or Not

by: Anne Haynes

I've been playing with the new search engine Cuil today and its usability is similar to Google but it's different. From the home page is looks like the dark side of Google with its full black background. Can you say Star Wars?

What I like is the ability to display the results in 1 - 2 or 3 column views. A nice feature that differentiates them from Google and the rest of the search engines clan. Another way to differentiate would be to move away from pagination and start using a refresh button to display the next page of results. I don't enjoy scrolling, so keeping everything in one page would be a nice change.

I think Cuil has a long way to go when it comes to figuring out relevance of text, images and video. The images that are being aligned with the content have nothing to do with each other - oops. Also, when I conducted a search on "Anne Haynes" old pages that no longer exsist showed up in the results.

It will be cool or in this case cuil to watch this search engine change. You never know who will be the next Google and let's remember that Yahoo! use to be #1.