Remember Cuil? The upstart search engine that launched with a bang and a whimper last year? I’d forgotten about them too, until today when they happened to pop into my mind and I decided to see whether they still existed and what they’ve been up to since I last checked them out.
I decided to test Cuil using one of the high ranking posts on my tech blog. There was no SEO magic applied to this particular post, it is just useful content that was produced at the right time to solve a particular problem for a lot of people.
Here are the Cuil results for the search phrase – all of them completely useless and not relevant at all.
Here are the Google results for the same search phrase. All highly relevant, and several of those directly provide the solution to the technical problem. Most importantly the #1 result provides the solution, so a Google user doesn’t need to click through several results to find the answer.
Now this is just one example but the message is pretty clear. Any search engine interested in building market share and taking on Google (or Yahoo! or Live for that matter) needs to actually work and not produce useless results. Search engines are complex things, but that part is simple.
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