Is it ironic that I had to Google for Cuil? Or is it merely an indication of my waning net attention span?
Is Cuil any different? Could it be better? The press is having a field day, split along the usual lines: traditional news outlets are pumping the “David Vs. Goliath” aspect, the tech writers? Cuil = Fail. It’s all a big bus, and everyone (self included) has climbed on with their two cents fare. And I have to say, the outlook is not really that great at first glance.
But honestly, I was an early adopter of Infoseek. And Lycos. And AltaVista, AskJeeves, Yahoo. Even Ask.com. (Maybe not so much with that Microsoft thingy: what’s it called again? I gotta go Google it…). And most of those ended up sucking (IMHO).
So I say, give a webservice a break. USE it for pity’s sake. Shake it down. Let it surprise and disappoint. Don’t simply listen to the “experts”. Don’t give it the two minute cursory glance. USE IT. Then either abandon or embrace.
Has our attention span gotten so short that we can no longer seriously…
…
Ummm. HELLO?
mofro 
Whoops. Looks like I screwed up that link! Let’s try it again!
Speaking of thumbnails that don’t correspond to the search results …
And before you click on that, you should know it’s not safe for work. Or sanity. But what would I know about that?
Yeah… So I get the same ego letdown, but i’ve been used to that for a while. When you are named the same as some wacky mathematician, and half the population of France, it kinda happens that way.
As for my site, I’m also not really expecting much love. Have you HEARD of the band called MOFRO? no? Well the series of tubes seems to have.
I’ve noticed the mixed-up and seemingly irrelevant items in the searches. I’m sure they’ll fix that. And I’m sure they’ll fix a great deal of the other initial gripes. Some of the worst offenses have nothing to do with technology or capability, simply choices. Like the Black home page. Or the decision to not list the items with a clear hierarchy.
Dan, the fact that you come up as the second hit is pretty impressive. Or it would be, if the site behaved better overall. How do you come up on Google?
But seriously, is ego surfing REALLY the best way to judge a search engine? I mean, maybe if we were Estonia, Rudyard Kipling or Beyonce….
Psion, I think you hit on why Dan’s gut-check reaction will probably bear out: there are so many other positive aspects to Google as-is, that people would be hard pressed to simply switch. I like the integration of the news and images “tabs” when I do a search. I merely have to hit a link and my search term becomes a gallery. Or this hours news…
Anyway, I’m interested in how this site/trainwreck evolves. Meet you guys back here in a couple of days? A week? Betcha there is a significant change in less than a month’s time…
Correction … make that a German site.
I’m ambivalent. I appreciate Google not just for the search engine, but for a variety of tools collected together and increasingly integrated. I’m also very used to the Google format for search results. Cuil has a tendency to mix graphics with search results that don’t seem to make sense, nor does there seem to be anything akin to an advanced search feature (not that there isn’t one, only that I haven’t found it right away).
It’s very Web 2.0-ish, though. Clean and simple.
As far as egos are concerned, I empathize with Dan. A search on ‘psidonia’ neatly returned a link to my home page as the first hit … along with the aforementioned graphic weirdness (apparently Cuil feels this picture has something to do with me). I also found a French site which uses the word in feminine hygiene products … a fact I’m sure I’ll have difficulty living down if this makes it back to Ichiban.
Cuil blows! When searching for myself on Google, I come up as the second result.
When searching on Cuil, yesterday there were no results at all. Today I am not even on the top 5 pages.
And since ego factors greatly into which I prefer, Google wins.
Apart from that though, it almost seems that the Internet has morphed itself to work according to Google’s methods. With everyone having gone on massive linking sprees in order to boost their page rank as well as the sheer volume of sites that have adsense incorporated, Google is more like the engine that drives the Internet instead of a mere search engine.
It’s going to take some pretty slick tricks to dethrone Google and I don’t see Cuil doing it.