Cool Or Not Cuil?
Well, since Cuil (pronounced 'Cool') is finally up and running and since so many people are blogging about it I thought I had to say something about it myself.
I couldn't do that until today, the website was supposed to be launched on Monday the 28th of july but somehow it only started working today in the Netherlands.
Anyhow, here it is:
Positive points
It's Fast. The look is great, the user interface is simple and intuitive (eg. page links are always displayed so you don't have to scroll). Some great features: search term suggestions, tabs, explore by category.
Negative points
Cuil uses a different method of determining which pages it should return:
'Rather than rely on superficial popularity metrics, Cuil searches for and ranks pages based on their content and relevance.' -Cuil's about page
Though I think that I prefer the 'superficial popularity metrics' Google uses because somehow the top results never are the ones that I was looking for.
On my first couple of queries I got a lot of double results, eg. page 1 and 2 showing the same results. The URLs of these pages are different, but they have the same content. A search engine should compare the content of pages to check for doubles.
Cuil displays images relating to the results found, so not necessarily images that are on the page found. A cool feature if properly constructed. However sometimes Cuil gets it very wrong: when searching for this website for some reason I got an image of the 'Florida Obstetric and Gynecologic Society' ...
Something I hate when using a search engine is being redirected to the results page of another search engine. In my experience Cuil does this a lot.
Conclusion
It's got potential! Their philosophy is to solve the two great problems of search: how to index the whole Internet—not just part of it—and how to analyze and sort out its pages so you get relevant results.
By reading this philosophy and trying the search for myself I would say they are a long way from actually giving the most relevant results.
I'm hoping they will fix this soon, it would be nice to have a good alternative to Google. I will however keep using Google as my primary search engine since I'm also using GMail, Google Reader and Google Calendar it is simply the easiest.
31-07-2008 18:16:23 - Comments (5)
I Took It!
Yes, I did it! I took 'The Survey for people who make websites'.
Are you a 'designer, developer, information architect, project manager, writer, editor, marketer or someone else who makes websites'? Then you should take it too:
I also took the first survey which was taken in april last year, results can be found here.
31-07-2008 01:11:15 - Comments (0)
