Cuil has received a lot of bad press over the past few months. Unfortunately, much of it deserved. I hadn’t used Cuil since it was launched but after it’s spider visited one of my websites (and proceeded to trigger a bunch of 404’s by looking for files that are long gone — a mistake that Google, Yahoo and Live don’t make) I thought I would take another look. I didn’t have much like the second time either.
My biggest issues with Cuil at this stage are:
- Search results page layout: it’s horrible. There is way too much text shown for each entry, the images don’t match the entries (i.e. Microsoft entry; Sun Microsystems image) and they’ve decided to be different by showing the search results in three columns, instead of top to bottom like every other search engine (it would be OK if it was an improvement, but it’s not — it’s really not).
- Search results text: largely nonsensical. They’ve just cobbled together various bits of text from the website they’re indexing — what, do they think that their algorithm can describe the websites content better than the websites editor? It doesn’t flow; it doesn’t make sense; it doesn’t make me want to click on the link.
All-in-all Cuil have a ton of work to do. Having the world’s largest index doesn’t mean squat if you can’t process the information it contains and present it in a half-decent way.