A new search engine (do we need another one?) has opened for business today. Cuil (pronounced Cool) is brought to us by a couple of ex-Googleites. I thought that I would give it a spin. Cuil reckons that it indexes three times the pages of Google and ten times that of Windows Live Search so my hopes were high to find some new pages.
First impressions were good – it looked slick and had a nice clean interface – though not as clean as Google. The acid test though is on search ability. Initially I searched for “Neil Thompson” but this turned out to be no boost for the ego as I didn’t appear in any of the returned results I checked (like most people I got bored after the first page). On Google I appear fifth on the first page.
Next I thought I would search for someone more famous than myself – my cartoonist friend Jim Bamber. Of course his name is less common than mine so there were immediate hits but none were for his own site at jimbamber.co.uk which appears as the first link on Google. In fact I couldn’t find this in the first five pages which I found amazing.
So on my series of tests I have to say that Cuil was pretty disappointing proving once again that bigger isn’t always best.