Ryan's Blog

I just wanted to do a quick review on the new search engine, Cuil (www.cuil.com). For those of you that have not heard about it yet, it is a brand new search engine that was created by a few of the original developers of Google. They claim to have indexed significantly more websites than any other search engine on the web. Compared to most search engines, the look and feel of Cuil is significantly different than what most people are used to. To start, it is an all black interface with similar simplicity like Google but, in my opinion, better looking. They also appear to boast the amount of pages they have indexed right on the homepage for you to see everytime you use Cuil. The Search Engine Result Page (SERP) does not have your standard title and description in list format but rather a uniquely designed layout that consists of the title, description, url and a related image; all in a block style format.

So what do I think about Cuil?

Well, as a web designer and SEO consultant, I am a little critical when it comes to something like this. From a design aspect, I think the site looks great; its not overdone but its also not plain either. The results page I am still undecided on because I like the fact that it is new and unique but the symmetry is off everytime you do a search because each result block can be a different size. I also like the added feature of a related image; however, when I tested a few searches I did notice that alot of images do not actually match up with the company being displayed. Not only that but I actually found at least two results that had a competing company's logo as their related image; that is definitely not good. I also really like the tabs at the top of the results page that shows you filters for similar keyword results. While other search engines have a similar feature, they are not as prominent and accessable as Cuil's. One of my favorite things about Cuil's design layout is the fact that the search bar and the pages of results are in a locked position on the top and bottom of the window for easy accessability. With Cuil you can search or switch pages without having to scroll back to the top or bottom of the results like Google and Yahoo are set up.

Now from an SEO standpoint, I am a little bothered by Cuil's performance. They claim to have the most pages indexed among any search engine; however, when I did my initial test searches for company names that I have either designed or optimized, there were NO results. Not a single page had been indexed and most of these websites are pretty highly trafficked and ranked on competing search engines. Not only that, but when I searched for the term "DVD duplication" (for one of my clients that is a DVD duplicator) it also displayed NO results. I did not believe this, seeing as how that is a somewhat competitive keyword. I had to refresh the page 3 times before I actually got results and after I got results, I refreshed again and it came back with no results. Now I am not going to be upset that this search engine did not rank my clients websites as high as I would like them to but I would definitely expect that when I search for a company name, that my clients website would at least appear. To fix this, I did take advantage of a feature that I do really like about Cuil; you can actually request for them to index your site right from their website: Cuil Crawl Me.

Obviously this is a very new search engine so I will limit my review to what I have already said until further testing. With as many negatives that I have found so far, I think Cuil has still got a ways to go; however, I do think that Cuil has massive potential and I am also sort of glad that another possible Google competitor is out (I still love you Google). I will be continually using and testing Cuil to keep up to date on their fixes and search result quality but for now I think I will stick to Google as my search engine of choice.

Labels: cool, cuil, google, review, search engine, seo consultant, web design