Web giant Google has a new rival this week, as the search engine Cuil was launched on Sunday night. The new service searches 120 billion web pages – 3 times as many as Google – and its central idea is to track down the most relevant content, rather than the most popular.
A good thing, surely? But after a couple of days using Cuil, I’m not yet sold on it. Its deep-search methods actually seem to dig up even more irrelevant content. An example: type in “Gordon Brown + recession” into both Google and Cuil. Google’s top 5 includes articles from The Times, Guardian and Telegraph websites. Cuil, on the other hand, directs you to internet discussion boards wikio.com and inform.com, and a page entirely in Welsh.
Cuil’s search results page is presented in columns combined with images – rather than a Google-style list – which makes it difficult to process the page’s copious information. And it neither alerts you to misspellings nor guarantees the elimination of explicit material; which, when it automatically provides images, is sure going to worry parents.
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