The Cuil (say “kewl”) Search Engine
August 5th, 2008
There’s a new search engine on the block called Cuil. What’s a search engine you ask? Well, it’s what we used to use before Google was invented… and they didn’t work.
Cuil is, as it happens, quite nice, returning good results, with an interesting layout, clean interface, search categories, having type-ahead scrolling and it’s even snappy to use. Even better…. it’s black rather than white, which in emotional language means it is indeed cool.
Whether we need another search engine is neither here nor there, because even when I’ve genuinely liked an alternative to Google, Google is so in-grained that I end up using it anyway despite myself. Google is a hard habit to break.
But, and this is the big but, it has one hugely important missing feature. A feature that you don’t truly appreciate till it’s gone. Cuil has no “Did you mean?” search correction. If I was designing a search engine, this would be the very first feature. You can argue all day about features or whether search results are relevant or not and not get anywhere useful but the one thing you know totally and absolutely about any search engine is that people will make typos. It’s completely and totally guaranteed.
I wish them luck and wonder when they’ll be releasing CuilReader, CuilBlogger, CuilAnalytics, CuilBase, CuilAdwords etc. etc. etc.