How cuil is it?
Cuil.com (pronounced cool) if you’ve not already heard about it is a new search engine launched by 3 ex-employees of Google and it has gone live today.
I was keen to try it out as I thought anybody wanting to leave a success story like Google must have something pretty interesting up their sleeves. Perhaps more importantly though I read in The Independent that the last time Google published figures on the number of pages they index was about 3 years ago and the figure stood at 8.2 billion pages catalogued whereas Cuil are promoting on their site below the search box that they have catalogued over 121 billion pages and counting!
In terms of the design I really liked the simplistic layout and I think it has very strong branding with black, a sharp blue and grey as the core colours used. Actually in terms of the simplicity it reminded me of google before all of the add-ons and extras, not that I’m complaining about them as I find most of them very useful but still I like the simplicity, the innocence of it. Apparently the name Cuil is derived from one of the founders celtic origins….I wonder if it was originally pronounced ‘cool’ back then?
Once you’ve entered a search, you’re faced with an interesting layout, quite different from other search engines, the returns are presented in a more creative way, as capsules of information and you can choose to have them in either 2 or 3 columns and approximately 4 capsules deep per page. As it’s different to most other search engines it does take a bit of adjusting to get used to it but on the whole design-wise I don’t have any complaints and it will be interesting to see how it evolves over the coming months.
However sadly in terms of performance I was a little disappointed, I got several responses of ‘No results found’ for keyword searches which I know not to be the case on the other leading search engines. I also lost my patience with the download time of the pages as I scrolled through, painfully slow at times. But these are early days… in fact this is their first day so a few teething problems can only be expected and I don’t want to be too harsh on them.
I’ll continue to monitor the progress of this search engine and would love nothing more than to see a new search engine company take on Google head to head, competition is always healthy for us the users!
Good luck Cuil!
