Not so Cuil

The one thing I hate about being on vacation for a long period of time is that I tend to miss technology - in general. Luckily of all the channels the resort TV received in English CNN was one of them, and hoping to get the technology fix I watched for little while and got lucky. The headline story was the launch of Cuil, the new search engine that was reported to take on Google. I was now in depression because I was totally disconnected from the world and there is a new search engine to try, but I had to wait until I got home the next day.

The inital sense I had of Cuil was, hey they have a chance if they can build on personal search and content relevance. Now with actual hands on searching and test of Cuil I am steering away from impressed. I set Cuil as my homepage so I can go an entire work day with nothing, but one search option and found myself needing other search engines to finish the task. Some of the things I found lacking was the readability of the search set, immediate direction of content flow, images that were irrelevant to search, no spelling suggestion, and to long of descriptions. Granted I know some of these short comings are because they needed to find a differentiators and the viewing window is a great thing to change because the top – down, left – right reading of traditional search is a dinosaur soon to become extinct.     

On the contrast Cuil did some things right. The layout has a lot of potential and I think when things are hashed out and people become accustom to the display it will catch on, drop-down search suggestions, the “drilldown” feature, and when the photos do relate to the search they add a nice social and familiarity element.

I think until the bugs are worked out and the suggestions are fully digested by Cuil I don’t think they will be widely adopted as a primary search tool, but the potential is there and a change is in the air. People generally don’t change something like this until their current tool no longer meets their needs or a new tool can meet their needs better, or at least make them think they are. Overall, I think this is a great start and will become a hit, but as for an initial release they are not quite there yet. Stay tuned and try Cuil for yourself because the evolution is there.