I'm sure you've heard by now, there's a new "me too!" search engine, Cuil. Founded by someone that sold some stuff to google, it was released with a ton of fanfare. I'm not one to buy the hype, but to give it a fair shake, Let's put it to a simple test. I am going to conduct a semi-scientific comparison between cuil and the other major search engines. Yahoo, Google and Live. First up, I want to find the download for the new KDE 4.1 release. I will not be logged into any site during these tests and will include the origional search I did along with an image of the first page. If a good result is returned, it will be highlighted in red. I will not be using search tools (google tool bar, yahoo tool bar, etc). I will be going directly to the main site and typing in my search.
-- Test 1 --
Search entered : KDE 4.1 Download
Winner on this one, and this surpised me, Yahoo. 1st return, dead on. The rest of them, with the exception of Cuil, had acceptable results within the first page (all within first 3). Cuil disappointed me on this one, but curiously, a LOT of the results came back from l10n.kde.org so thats -close- but it seems the results were more -informational- not discovery. Onto the next test. Clear out the cache, and onto the next test. I want to know what the weather's like in Columbus Ohio...
-- Test 2 --
Search entered : weather conditions columbus ohio
Winner on this one is arguable. Yahoo and Google provide a quick hit extended forecasts, but all 4 return links on the first page are the weather for the Columbus Ohio. Now I want to find out something totally different. I want to find a formula that isn't searched for much but any EET would know about it - LaPlace (pronounced La plaz) Transforms. More importantly, I'm going to intentionally spell LaPlace as LaPlase and ask for an example...off I go.
-- Test 3 --
Search entered : LaPlase Transform Example
Winner on this one is google - first two results are examples that I'd expect. Something strange on the Cuil -- the left most result came back with a keyword spamming "mywebpage.netscape.com" -- hardly site worth looking at. Next search, I want to use a very vague search, American LeMans (racing). This should return a ton of stuff for all of them. With that, let's see what happens...
-- Test 4 --
Search entered : American LeMans
Initially, there's no winner here either, BUT ...and that's a full wholesome but, Cuil provides something that's pretty sweet -- "Explore by Category"
I like this! Now THAT is a nice bonus. Maybe I'd like to look more into a driver or some other bit of racing. For that, I give them winner of this final test.
Overall, I do NOT think that Cuil will be the end all, fix all to google. Not in the least bit. I do think they're category thing is different but I also would like to bring something else up -- the picture associations. Sometimes there's images that show up with searchs that ...don't add up, at all, such as a Cuil Search for Jim Holmes.
That's ...not what he looks like ...unless there's something he's not telling me about his kids.
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