If you are going to roll out a new search engine, please try to make one that has more going for it than a silly name and cheap, misleading PR. Thus we have Cuil, the search engine rolled out this last week by some ex-Google folks who see a market opportunity. While all the people involved seem competent and have great resumes, the site itself out-and-out stinks.
It's buggy. It's slow. It seems hand-tweaked in odd ways. Worse, it requires exact spelling. Use lower case on a proper name and it can come up empty (but not always).
But it's the apparent fiddling with the results that bother me the most. Here's where it gets funny. Type in "Sergey Brin" (the founder of Google) and you get back a whopping "250 results for Sergey Brin"; yes, 250. And they are mediocre hits, many dating back to his Stanford days in the 1990s. There is an "Explore by Category" box, which won't help me find out anything about Brin, from what I can tell. It's pathetic. On Google you get 1.5 million hits. And if you think that's because of Google bias, on MSN Search you get over 3 million hits.
This is pathetic, since Cuil founder Anna Patterson has 11,381 results for herself. And the top search hit is her glowing bio on the Cuil site itself. What a coincidence! Try finding a Brin bio. Then if you search for Louis Monier, the ex-Googler and go-to man at Alta Vista who is now working at Cuil, he gets over 13,000 hits, many with flattering pics that are of other people.
So I decide to do a vanity search on myself to find out where my current bio appears. It's on the Dvorak.org site. Low and behold, the Cuil engine doesn't seem to find my blog at all, let alone my bio. One version of the search using my middle initial comes close, offering up at least a Wikipedia entry. But subsequent uses of my middle initial come up dead altogether. So I go with "John Dvorak." My blog gets a million page views a month, but Cuil finds a bunch of other blogs and tired old posts or people grousing. The top hit was a CSS blog commenting on a two-year-old story I wrote (although Cuil never found the story itself); the next two were "Dvorak is an idiot" posts from even more obscure blogs followed by various entries about me that you find on speakers' bureaus' Web sites. Yeah, this is endearing. No mention of PC Magazine, MarketWatch.com, Cranky Geeks, or any number of things I'm doing.
So I go to page two. After waiting for an eternity, I get pretty much the same thing on page two: people who condemned me on their blogs. Hey, I can go to Technorati for this abuse! Page 3: still no mention of my own blog or PC Magazine or MarketWatch.com or even Mevio. In fact, some of the hits are redundant. OK, so how many times do I have to pound this thing to find my base Web sites—any of them? I gave up after page six and figured that this site was useless. I mean, if your search term has their own Web site, you'd think said Web site would be in the search results. If I was doing a search engine, it would be a priority. After all, Dvorak is in the URL!!
And, yes, I do have enough presence on the Web to use myself as a benchmark.
Now you're wondering if this site has any usefulness. When the site was actually reviewed by others, I didn't see anybody jacked up about anything. Here is an example from this BBC blog:
Search term: "Nikon d50 reviews problems". Plenty of articles on the D70 camera, but none on the D50 (which might suggest it isn't doing its job in terms of prioritising meta tags and headlines above freetext). Google however got a good review from a reputable independent source as first link.
So while I'm always hoping for something better or more interesting or uniquely valuable, I still end up having to use Google. This over-hyped product is just another dead-end as far as I can tell. Oh, and the name is stupid too.