I have been seeing a lot of references to cuil.com popping up in my RSS feeds and tweets lately. Wondering what it was all about (and how it is supposed to be pronounced), but too lazy to actually click on any of the links, I put the url in my trusty Firefox browser and was sent to a new search engine.
Cuil.com is a new search engine that claims to search “three times as many as Google and ten times as many as Microsoft”. They don’t mention Yahoo, but, then again with all of the trouble they are having lately, I guess I am not surprised. My first thought on seeing this is, do we really need another search engine? First off, I don’t actually go to the search engine pages, I generally just type my query into the search bar at the top of my browser. It appears that you can add this functionality, but would it be worth it…
I decided to give this browser a try. I didn’t really have anything at the top of my search list, so I decided to type my name in, Shawn Cope. Hmmmm, well the top search for my name was an article on the musician, Citizen Cope, and while I like his music, this obviously wasn’t what I was looking for. Thinking I should refine my search, I added quotes around my name. This search yielded somewhat better results in that it actually found pages that referenced my name. There were lots of pages that referenced me, or pages which I had left comments on. What it did not find however were any references to my site, www.shawncope.com. This is kind of worthless to me. If I do this same search in Google or Yahoo, that is the top search result, and what I have to assume someone might be searching for. I could not find this link in the top 3 pages.
I did a few other searches, and they all came up with somewhat interesting results, nut not the most relevant results. For me, this will not become my search engine of choice anytime soon. Perhaps in the future, they will get better, and I will change my mind. I doubt however I am going to change my mind about their name. Is it supposed to be pronounced, cool, coil or something else?
Tags: review, web browser
