Imad Jomaa blog

I’m sure we have all heard of the Cuil (pronounced cool) search engine. It’s dark, gloomy, and well, it seems like they don’t want me using it.

When you first visit there website, before you can start browsing, there are a few steps as shown below:

1. Give your eyes a few seconds to adjust to the dark color
2. Locate the tiny search box near the bottom of the screen
3. Enter your search query & hit return

While their idea may be innovative, the theme they have chosen isn’t quite working. Imagine yourself as a door-to-door salesperson, you come up to a home, the lawn is dead, the mailbox post is barely standing, the walkway is well beat and destroyed, and as you get to the door, your face covers with spiderwebs - not a welcoming place is it? This is exactly how it is for Cuil, the first thing you see when you land on the homepage is a dark & unwelcoming page with a tiny search box screaming “Over here!”

Despite the theme, lets dive right into the search.

When they first launched they had a feature allowing you to select how many columns of results you want per-page, now, it’s a default two which creates a ton of wasted space that can be used for displaying more results.

“Relevancy”

It seems like 127 billion indexed pages and counting provides quite a bit for you to search through, but without relevancy, you can definitely spend a lot of wasted time. Furthermore, it seems like they return decent results, however, they don’t seem to order their results based on site popularity, and the best example for this would be forum software. It seems it lists a forum software of which isn’t popular above others that are no doubt, the most popular forum software available. Additionally, while choosing a thumbnail for results is difficult, it did mess it up for quite a few as shown below (click on image for full size):

“Great Features”

Enough criticizing, let’s take a look at features that definitely make Cuil unique.

Firstly, they have an excellent mobile version which utilizes all their great features, check it out by visiting cuil.com on your mobile device. Secondly, they include a lot of fun javascript and real-time features that keeps things interesting while searching.

One of the main things I really enjoy about Cuil is their privacy policy:

“When you search with Cuil, we do not keep any personally identifiable information, period. Your search history is your business.”

Definitely beats Google, but I can see how it will effect optimization as it’s pretty much a guessing game at a larger-scale. However, another great addition is the option to turn ads on or off, it obviously shows you how devoted the team are towards their users’ browsing experience which they definitely deserve a pat on the back for.

Overall, the Cuil Search Engine definitely has a long way to go before I would consider using it solely, but check it out for yourself: http://cuil.com and leave your comments or feedback on the subject.

Until Next Time,

Take Care.