New search engine launches, sucks
Today sees the launch of Cuil (pronounced ‘Cool’), a brand new search engine launched by ex-Google employees.
So far, the launch has not gone smoothly. Having tested it quite a bit today I can report the following:
- It’s really, really slow just now. Probably just teething issues, but not a good sign.
- “No results because of high load…Due to excessive load, our servers didn’t return results. Please try your search again.”
- Nasty interface. A three column layout for results by default (ew!) means that I don’t immediately know where there most relevant results are. I’ve been trained to read search results top to bottom since the days of AltaVista – I am supposed to be reading left to right? One column then the other?
- Related searches at the top, and related categories on the right. Wha? Where? Who?
- Their about us page returns a 403 forbidden error!
- Thumbnails for search results that don’t relate to the content (for example, superstring theory – NSFW! Well spotted by digger Crypticlabs)
The performance issue on day one are forgivable; the usability issues less so. With excessive AJAX, and the issues mentioned above, the site is uncomfortable to use, at best.
Having said all that, I hope they do manage to provide an alternative to Google; everyone will benefit from a more competitive search market (rather than Google eating an ever-increasing slice of the pie), and their committment to privacy is laudable.
However, they’ve got a long, long way to go before they can match the power and simplicity of the big G.
Have you tried Cuil yet? What have your experiences been like?
It seems alright to me. I have a pretty fast computer, so rendering the images might take less time than on yours, but the number of images on a simple search is still too many. I agree that the layout of the results page is pretty confusing, but at least it looks nice and arranges itself without any errors. It also seems like it’s piggybacking on Google for a bunch of things (the search too?).
I would give it a few months and see if it gets better… it still seems to be in early stages.
Tried it for a few searches this afternoon and I have to agree, the results weren’t anything new and the fact that they didn’t even have a complete website (about us missing) made it look like they were not ready to go yet. I’m willing to give them sometime because not every website is perfect the first time it goes live. I’ll wait and see if they make the changes/improvements necessary to make them and alternate to Google.
I tried it out yesterday, and although the About section didn’t work (It does now), it was the least of my problems. I did a few searches, the first for one of my websites, which returned results #1 and #2 (the only two results), and the cache for it was over 10 months old. Earlier today, I tried searching for my name, which returns my blog on any other search engine, returned nothing about me at all. The same for my nickname. They say that index more than Google, but it really doesn’t seem so. It’s destined to fail, and the design is ugly.
I think it’s kinda lame, but maybe I’m missing something.
Just how many search engines are do we really need? Yes competition is good, we can see that when yahoo broke away from google. The general public will tend to stay with google and the search engine installed on their pre-installed software provided by the hardare supplier. Do we really need more?
regards
George