Cuil Review / by Allison James

This is old news, but what the hey.Cuil.com is a search engine created by, amongst others, ex-Google workers, looking to create a revolutionary new search engine. They cited the most popular search website, Google, as using outdated technology.

As soon as you go onto Cuil, you can see the website uses a sleek, modern design:

Cuil

Cuil

It also appears to partly base its simplicity off Google, which's default homepage is also little more than a logo, a search bar and a few buttons. Cuil also includes a boast that it indexes over 12 billion websites - a bold claim, which has led to criticisms that the site is more interested in the quantity of searched sites, not the quality of search results.

I found that these criticisms are agreeable. I searched for a several things in both Cuil and Google, and Cuil's results were far less fitting. For example, I tried "the year of elvis presley's death". For such a mundane question with such a single, findable answer, I'd expect to see it in the results without visiting websites. Google's second result clearly said in the title:

Elvis Death - Elvis Presley Death - Elvis Presley Died 16 August 1977

Cuil? Nothing. Nowhere. I got conspiracy theories, Elvis CD box sets on sale, and two results on Michael Jackson. Incidentally, Ask Jeeves (yes, we, the UK, got Jeeves back), Yahoo! Search, and Microsoft's Bing all managed to give me the precise date on the first page of results too.

So, Cuil looks pretty, but with so many other more competent search engines, it's rather pointless. It's fairly new, so I guess it has room for improvement, but I think Google is too popular for it to really get attention.

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