Started by three former employees of Google, Cuil (which they want you to pronounce as “cool”) claims to be the world’s biggest search engine, indexing more pages than everybody else put together.
At least, that’s the theory.
It seems like Cuil’s primary marketing strategy is Google bashing. They are very careful to point out that they don’t collect user information, or use “superficial” popularity rankings, or any other use based metrics, and they explicitly state that they index more than three times as many pages as Google. Were all that true, that would be great.
Unfortunately, they don’t live up to the hype.
A couple of informal tests (when I could access the site at all) were truly disappointing. Some queries claimed “thousands of results” but had only one or two “next” pages. In a few cases, some simple queries did not yield any results.
If that’s what more of the Internet looks like, then I’ll happily stick to my one third size index on Google.
UPDATE (04 Sep): So it turns out that “cuil” actually means “small irritating insect in the corner“. Figures, doesn’t it? (Via She whispers to words)
Post a Comment