The new search engine, Cuil (pronounced cool), got off to a great start PR-wise. But there are signs the early positive publicity is waning.
Just read through a review and analysis on ReadWriteWeb that both take a good look at Cuil’s first day. Calling it good but not great, and wondering if some of the people behind the hype online had done their homework. Cuil is the creation of some ex-Google employees who bill it as the biggest search engine on the Web – indexing 120 billion Web pages – which they say is three times more than any other search engine.
I tried it out tonight to see what it could do. It’s a nice interface, clean and a magazine-style layout that’s more like a Web site. I also like that it promises not to keep “any personally identifiable information on users or their search histories.” But I don’t know if it’s quite where its developers want it to be. I did several searches to see what came up.
First I tried my video business name.
Pretty sure this thumbnail image next to a headline about a video I uploaded is in no way tied to me.
What gives? I noticed that same happy group next to quite a few of my search results. There must be a Kevin Hunt in there somewhere.
And while trying to go into the fifth page of my search results I got this message: “Due to excessive load, our servers didn’t return results. Please try your search again.”
A solid base hit for Cuil. But not a home run.
