Buy Or Don’t Buy

I wanted to like Cuil.

Seriously, I did. Have you ever seen the Googlezon video? I have been forced to watch this video in every communications class I’ve ever taken (and that’s a lot of times, since I’m a communications major), and it is the stuff of nightmares. Sure, Google seems all fun and hippy-dippy and pet-friendly and innocuous, but really it’s aiming to take over the entire planet, one GMail account at a time.

So Cuil seemed like a good alternative. Launched this past Monday, it is the brainchild of a former Google employee who claims that her algorithm indexes more than 120 billion webpages - whereas Google only indexes webpages that it deems useful, meaning it likely has far less. Cuil (pronounced like “cool”) also doesn’t store your information the way Google does.

So, the positives: Cuil looks cooler than Google.  And it doesn’t store your information.

…The benefits pretty much end there. Cuil does appear to give you just as many results as Google, but it presents them in blocks of information that make a grid on your screen, in contrast to the verticle presentation offered by Google. Frankly, it’s not any easier to navigate than Google, and instead of providing you with the site’s overall purpose/description, it tends to provide the section of the website that mentions your search term the greatest number of times.

Cuil also failed when I gave it the ultimate litmus test: Susan Roesgen.

First off, when I Cuiled (see? that word is a lot less fun than Googled) the lovely Ms. Roesgen on Monday, there were ZERO results.  This is clearly inaccurate.  I Cuiled her today, and received 12,759 results.  The problem is, with Cuil’s “intuitive” grid layout, I have no idea which of these sources might be most useful to me.  I don’t know where to look!  There’s a reason why people making grocery lists write them in a list, and the reason is that it’s a hell of a lot easier to deal with.

So then I Googled Susan Roesgen, and got the old familiar results.

Google only provided me with 11,100 hits.  Which, of course, is more than enough anyway.  But Google tells me which Susan Roesgen sites are the most popular (and therefore probably the most relevant), and also has the handy Video, News, Images, etc. links across the top.

On Cuil, these options don’t exist.  And do you know which website is one of the first to pop up when you search for images of Susan Roesgen?

This one.

Therefore, to Cuil, BODB does not exist.  And that’s not cool.