Tuesday, July 29, 2008

Cuil, the verdict

Having tryed out the well hyped new search engine 'Cuil', I have a few observations I'd like to share:
-The site has got a raft of publicity in the past few days and expectations have been placed on the success of its searches. Such publicity has inevidably meant that 'innovaters' may be inclined to try out the site.
- My concern is that after using the site, I've found it to be slow and its searches to be less accurate than google.
-I must admit to liking the interface and thumbnail style views of results, but its results lack a number of features which I've come to heavily rely on with google: The prominent example being the suggestion of spelling corrections on search terms. I've also come to use cached pages on occasion which are noticably absent.
- All in all, I've no doubt that Cuil will in time iron out many of its flaws but the publicity machine maybe long gone by then and I wonder why now was chosen as its 'official' launch. It seems an extremely ill advised move in hindsight. Naming the site an explicit 'beta' may have alerted users to the early stages of the project.

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