Cuil - The World's Biggest Waste of Time
Cuil launched today with a plucky Drudge headline: CUIL TAKES ON GOOGLE “Cool,” thought I and gave it a go.
It is nothing short of terrible.
First off, the site has been ridiculously slow all morning which is terrible way to convery the whole “we’re-taking-on-Google” message. And please don’t use the “but we were featured on Drudge this morning” excuse—if you’re trying to oust the reigning search champion, you use some of the $30 million in venture capital to keep your site up, especially the day of the launch.
When their info page finally loaded, it was completely unstyled. At first, I thought they were going for the Google “anti-design” look; then I brought it up on my desktop machine and realized it was, in fact, styled. At least until I tried to get back there to grab some description text for this article and got a “Page Not Found” error. Perhaps it’s safer to link to the Wikipedia article…
Setting aside the issue of its cluttered layout and the fact that you have to teach people how to say the name, the results have been lousy as well, specifically the images it tries to “put in context”. If you search Google for “plasticmind”, I own the front page. A Cuil search for “plasticmind” turns up Gremlins, Brain Eaters, neon backpacks and a chubby white guy—not a single image that’s relevant. (Screenshot) What’s worse is that almost all of the results are either outdated or linked to non-existent pages: two duplicate results for my podcast directory which I moved last year; a link to my front page with last year’s header (I stopped using camel case on Plasticmind last year) and text from a news article I took down in 2006; a link to my audio directory which never actually got launched. In fact, the only text on the page that is up-to-date and relevant is the first listing, for my blog.
Doesn’t look like they’ll be “upsetting” Google anytime soon…
InterAction:
28 July 20082. Elise:
Very weird that they put random images to accompany the search results. The images should at least come from the page that is in the result, right? Instead I see images from completely different sites.
28 July 20083. Eric-the-Bun:
Note the images they use are stripped from other sites. Fair use would allow a search engine to use a screenshot or imaage from a page to illustrate an entry for that page.
Cuil has stripped dozens of images from my site to illustrate entries for other sites with no acknowledgement or explicit permision to do so.
Blatant copyright violation - I've invoiced them £4000 for a month's use of my images - I wonder if they'll pay?
28 July 20084. CuilSucks:
Cuil is friggin retarded, just like its inbred cousin Hulu. Some idiot out there is trying to pop-culture all the retarded four letter words in existence. What a joke. What strikes me as laughable is that Cuil raped $30 million out of investors. Serisouly, dosen't some Jhonney come lately try to take out Google every year? They always fail.
29 July 20085. Chuck:
Well I for one and very grateful to cuil. I think there is a definite need for this type of depth and drudgery. For instance I had almost forgotten some of those forums and posts I had made -say 3 to 6 years ago. Some of those sites are no longer active or even around. Google never produced that for me! So I say " Thank you, Cuil, for bringing back the memories! Now I need to go to google to get where I needed to go."
29 July 20086. ren:
I was a little amused by the strange conglomerations I got for search results. But they amusement was mitigated by the awkward format. There's a reason we like lists. They're easy to read.
5 August 20087. Michele:
Their usage of other people's images is going to get them into trouble. They're using images from our site to promote one of our competitors!
YourThoughts?
(Minutia)
This entry was written by Jesse on Monday, July 28, 2008 at 10:24 AM and appears in the SEO chapter. The previous article was entitled, "Tools of the Web Design Trade, Part 1", and the next entry is called, "Tools of the Web Design Trade, Part 2: Building Trust". Bookmark the permalink, save it to del.icio.us or Digg it.
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28 July 20081. michael:
Terrible, Terrible, Terrible. Did I mention Terrible?
I'll look past the slow-loading because I know a lot of people are checking it out right now. However, what I can't look past is the non-existent results, the poor format, and the mis-respresentation that Cuil has more pages than Google. How could they even compare themselves to Google? They aren't even in the same universe.
I don't even care too much for Google, and I was really looking forward to Cuil bringing something new and fresh to the table. All they did was offer a substandard search engine, a lot of hype, and they should be extremely embarrassed for going live with such an inferior service.
"Cuil" is NOT "Cool".