Webupon

I was stumbling across the internet today with StumbleUpon and came across this page on CNET. A search engine started by a former Google search architect? The article definitely piqued my interest – a “big new search engine,” started by a former Google search architect, taking aim at Google? So I went over to Cuil and tried it out.

First, I was impressed with how the landing page looks…completely black background, little search box in the middle of the page with an awesome blue “search” box. Cuil has a very neat, clean look. It was almost refreshing to have a search page with only three links, rather than the Google page that on my count currently has 18. I also like that it shows how many pages it currently indexes (121,617,892,992).

To try it out, I searched for the greatest basketball player of all time – “Michael Jordan.” The first thing that struck me was that there are three columns, instead of the one I’m used to with Google search. Something that would take getting used to, but maybe it would be easier to look over all the search results quickly. The next thing I noticed was that the links to more result pages are in a static bar on the bottom of the page, that doesn’t scroll with the rest of it. Also, on the right side of this bar is an option to make it two columns instead of three.

I scrolled down the page and realized that the top bar doesn’t scroll either, so your search box is always right there! The other neat thing about the top bar is that it has tabs with related searches. My search for Michael Jordan got me tabs about Michael Jordan shoes, wallpaper, and Michael Jordan biography. Clicking the “more…” link shows a drop down list with 12 more related searches – everything from his divorce to highlights to clothing. I thought that was pretty neat, as it makes it a lot easier to narrow down the almost 7 million search results I got and find what I need.

Something that I didn’t notice as special right away (because of a firefox addon that I have for google searches) is that next to each search result Cuil puts a thumbnail image…not of the page, but of a (seemingly) random image from the page. This is a neat approach, but I’m not sure if it will always work out…for a link to Air Jordan shoes, the image told me that they now accepted PayPal. For all of the other links though it gave me a pretty good impression of what the page was about.

To search something else I decided to search my name, in quotes so I might actually find stuff about me. I’m not as famous as Michael Jordan, so I only got 8 results. Something that I noticed though, was that in the top right it said there were more than 4,000 results. I did a search for another narrow topic in quotes – “university of maryland college park computer” – and it said that there were more than 226,000 results; I looked down at the bottom bar, and it showed only three pages of results. 11 per page, that should add up to 33. It’s probably just a bug, as Cuil was released only today, but it makes you think.

Cuil looks like it might have the stuff to provide some competition to Google, but it is definitely way to early to even guess. Like the CNET article says, most people now say “I’ll google it” instead of “I’ll search for it on the internet.” Maybe one day people will be saying “I’ll cuil it!”