Posted on August 2nd 2008 in Search Engines
Cuil has been live (or down apparently) for days now. While I immediately formed an opinion about the interface and result presentation, I wanted to keep using it for my own day-to-day searches in order to get a more complete picture about its search value.
Basically, I expected a lot more from all the information I read about it prior to launch. The results are presented in a grid, which would be ok (easier to scan results) except that the grid is actually a set of columns which resemble a newspaper page much more than an organized set of information. Since grid blocks are not the same size, quick scanning is more difficult, as you have to scroll up and down to see the titles and descriptions. Furthermore, since the results are organized in two dimensions, the usual linear approach of ranking results is absent, so I expect users to have a little trouble determining which result is deemed more relevant compared to others, although this is not necessarily bad.
That aside, they kept the right margin space for advertising options, which aren’t there and probably won’t be for a while. This I think was a bit too quick. Why not offer more results on the page, and introduce paid results later? Since the results are two-dimensional, there is no clear way to distinguish a result that ranks better, and is therefore a desired position over other results. Google (and the rest) give linear results based on ranking priority, so the vertical component is much more important for ranking. Maybe a bit too soon to beyond this, since Cuil has only just started and is probably going to experiment a lot (hence the 2/3 column kayout option in bottom left of the screen).
The “Explore by Category” that appear for certain queries are neat, and actually do return interesting links towards content/results that may help me drill down further on a topic. But that’s pretty much in vain, since many of the queries I performed were answered with “no results found”, which wouldn’t be very strange, if it wasn’t for the fact that they boast billions of pages in the index (120+ billion!). Long tail search doesn’t seem to work, and basically if you type in more than 2-3 words, you’ll get scarce results if at all, but I am seeing improvements regarding this over time. Again, something that will probably change over time, simply too early for a more firm opinion. Sometimes, Cuil reports incorrect number of results compared to what you’re shown - for example “pamp for uiq symbian” returned 3 results, but showed only 2. Another bug?
Some of the queries returned results in multiple languages - for example French and English - all on the same page, side by side. I speak a few languages but if you are researching something, one language is really enough. It would be better if the application offered a choice to see results in other languages, if for example I didn’t find anything useful in English. This, however, didn’t happen too often, so I guess this was either a bug, or an experiment.
Notably, there is a clear absence of rich media results, or at least I didn’t get any, but I’m sure this will also change in the future.
Then there are numerous reports about the service being down due to overload. I haven’t experienced their down time intervals, but have frequently come upon the “no results found” scenario already mentioned. This is probably a start-up fluke, so I don’t expect this to happen too often.
Cuil could be an interesting new search option, especially since the people behind it certainly have the necessary experience and knowledge. I expect it to develop over the next months, and the real picture about its performance compared to ther search engines will be more complete then.
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Just downloaded the new version of Gmail Mobile and so far all I can say is “wow”! Much better than the previous versions, and I’ve tried several on my Sony Ericsson P1i. There was always something wrong with them (no full screen, loads too long, blocks in the middle of work, I couldn’t just enter an email address, but had to save it in contacts first, etc).
), and goes full screen right away. Additionally, the interface is automatically set for my language (Serbian Cyrillic) which is also nice. The menu is much better organized, and most of all, I like the fact I can now enter an email address without having to put it in my address book first, something that annoyed me very much in the previous versions. There are some other goodies as well, such as easy search through email archive, and switching between multiple Gmail accounts (!), offline email drafting and reading of recent messages. Also there are neat shortcuts for those with a QWERTY or other similar keyboards.
