Cuil? Say what?

So I was finally able to get into Cuil and try a few searches. I have to say that I’m not overly impressed with what I’ve seen so far, but I’m trying to stay open-minded and I’ll keep trying it. I’m not convinced that the search results are as contextually relevant as I need them to be. And on some levels, Cuil simply fails, and fails bigtime.

Here are a couple of sample searches.

Now I realize that Iron Man wasn’t the biggest movie of the summer. It’s not going to give the Dark Knight a run for its money. It was reasonably popular though, and you’d think I would be able to find something. Fan sites? Perhaps an IMDB listing? Or hmmm . . . I don’t know . . . maybe the actual movie site?

This is another strange one.

The University of Mississippi only has several thousand web pages, so it’s no wonder Cuil couldn’t find it, huh? Strangely though, if I capitalize my search terms, Cuil does return hits. I wonder if the Cuil folks realize that most people don’t capitalize things when they’re doing a search? Live and learn.

An Inauspicious Start

As I was driving in to work this morning, I head an NPR story about the new search engine, Cuil, and I was ready to give it a try. Created by former Google employees, Cuil hopes to challenges Google’s 60+ % market share dominance in part by indexing more pages than any other search engine provider.

So imagine my surprise when I went to the website and got this:

And this:

I like Google. I’ve used it regularly since I first heard about it, and it is my search engine of choice. However, I’m not a zealot. I’m willing to try new search engines to see if they give me better results than my fave. But if you’re going to try to take on Google, you’d better make sure your stuff works on opening day!

An inauspicious start indeed!