Wayne D's Blog

I remember when I switched from altavista as my primary search engine to Google. Google provided a nice clean interface with highly relevant results. What you were searching for usually shows up on the first page and Google is still the gold standard for search engines. Cuil debuted this week trumpeting that there index was three times larger than Google and like many others I decided to give it a try. I used the same search query I used in the Powerset vs. Google challenge. I typed "how much does a loonie weigh" and hit enter. The result, nothing. Then it was on to a vanity search wdawe.com. The first page of results show links to wdawe.com but doesn't list the primary site. Then i searched for eeepc camera flash support, which on google , Yahoo and live.com brings up my blog post on the eeepc port of the flashcam project as the first result. The result, again nothing. It looks like there is a lot of junk in that index cuil.com says is three times bigger than Google. Cuil has received a pretty rough ride mostly because they created very high expectations and then failed to even come close. Search results that do come up also suffer from poor relevancy. Cuil.com looks cool but the search results are worse than live.com. They still have much work to do.