Syzlak’s SEM

Cuil Story, Anna Patterson!

Posted on: July 28, 2008 by Syzlak

Time for yet another Google rival to enter the arena. This is all a bit funny sometimes. Think about it, we have 2 major search engines that can’t figure out a way to compete with Google already. One’s always trying to buy the other, the other’s working with Google not to get bought…the arena’s already full.

Former Googler Anna Patterson disagrees.

Patterson has recently launched Cuil – a new search engine that displays results in a magazine layout. Apparently, Cuil is going to return results based upon the “actual content” of a given page.

Ok.

In my preliminary searches, Cuil has not impressed me. I think it’s great to have more competition in the search engine world, and I honestly would welcome an upstart on to the scene. However, this engine just doesn’t do it for me. The idea behind a magazine layout is kinda cool, unfortunately the pictures that are interspersed with the results ruin the experience. Since Cuil displays pictures next to a result, I assume that the picture is somehow tied to that page-in reality it’s just different media into one big SERP.

Is the layout the appeal? To me, it seems confused. I think SERPs should be analytical; give me my results ranked on a page and differentiated by file type. Pages in one result, pics in another, videos in the next. If you have to put them on one page, try to do it like A9 or Ask…oh wait, they aren’t really doing so well are they?

I think Cuil could be competitive if they stop trying to fool me into thinking that I’m reading the newspaper. People understand that the web is not a magazine, and I believe they want results to be ranked. For that matter, I think that most of the time (studies prove this) people just want one result. In that case, allow me to promote the Search Engine Highlander. I think you’ll be pleasantly surprised.