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The one I would rate second-best, Yahoo!, doesn't even come close to measuring up, either for speed or results. And speed is extremely important to me because I'm stuck with a heartbreakingly slow rural dial-up INternet connection for what will likely be a year to 18 months or so yet (broadband has been promised "by the end of 2009"), so every bit of speed at the other end helps, and so does Google's clean, uncluttered, and largely graphics-free user interface.
However, the hype about a new search engine with the odd name of "Cuil" (which reportedly means “knowledge” in Irish Gaelic — or not — others who know more about the language than I do, which is to say anything at all, protest that the word can also be translated as “corner,” “nook,” “hazel,” as in nut, or even "rear" or several more convoluted explanations) sparked my curiosity last weekend, particularly the fact that Cuil was developed by ex-Google staffer Anna Patterson — who worked on the TeraGoogle indexing system that underlies Google — and her husband and fellow search engine developer Tom Costello. Could Cuil be Google, only better?
Unfortunately not.
Rather than an advance in search engine efficiency, we get a gimmick - Cuil presents results results in three columns across the page instead of the conventional single column. and displays them with thumbnail graphics, which of course slows things down significantly on dial-up, although that may be relatively inconsequential for broadband users.
However, the main disappointment for me was the quality of results. I have been researching an article on POP 3 email clients this week, so I decided to try a search for the homepage of the Open Source Eudora 8/Penelope project at Mozilla.org. I entered "Eudora + Penelope", but all Cuil turned up at the top of the results page were a bunch of Web-published news and commentary stories about the Open Source project.
Google, on the other hand, immediately presented the result I had been looking for on the first pass, with the MozillaWiki Penelope homepage as the first suggestion.
Inspired by the cup of Pomegranate-Flavored Green Tea I was drinking, I decided to try a search for "Pomegranate." Again, Cuil came back with a bunch of stuff that didn't interest me in the slightest, while Google immediately referred me to several pages of factual information about Pomegranate fruit and tree culture.
The problem seems to be that while Google uses the crude but objectively sound criterion of hit popularity to rank returns' order of appearance, Cuil tries to be cool and "smarter" than Google and attempts to rank by the quality of content, which is of course far more subjective, and as I discovered - inefficient.
Doing searches for myself - "Charles W. Moore" was amusing in that six of the first page's 11 "based on quality" returns (out of 1,143) actually did reference me, which was sort of flattering, albeit mostly a mystifyingly random and eclectic smattering of product reviews and news stories I've written for Web publication, while only one of Google's 10 first-page returns (out of 1,610,000!) based on "popularity" had anything to do with me, which I suppose is in a way proportionately even more flattering, although I did discover that Charles W. Moore is anything but a unique or distinctive name.
I do really like this automatic and live-updating drop-down menu on the Cuil search home page, which is quite entertaining to play with as well as useful.
However, in general,my take is that Google has little to worry about from Cuil, which you can check out for yourself here if you're so inclined:
http://www.cuil.com/
Charles W. Moore
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