The problems with Cuil search
I just took a look at the new kid on the search engine block, Cuil (pronounced "cool"). I hadn't heard of it, but apparently it has been hyped by mainstream media as the next Google. Of course, it's not and I doubt it ever will be.
But it's not that I don't believe that a new search engine can't compete with Google. It's just that Cuil can't in it's current form.
Cuil has been criticised for poor search results so far, but I can accept that relevance will grow with use. So I'm not surprised that Googles results are noticeably more relevant than Cuil.
I think Cuil will fail purely because of design.
First of all, the opening page is black. Black is intimidating and uninviting. It's the colour most used by geek sites and WoW guilds. Metal-heads wear black shirts. Wealthy people drive black cars. I use black on my site, but I'm not trying to appeal to everyone.
The next issue is that search results are sorted into columns. Now this could be a usability boon, but it won't feel like it after years and years of using Google. So, again, it's going to alienate. We are conditioned to know that the top item in google is the most relevant, but when your results are arranged into a grid and I'm not really sure where to look.
The creators of Cuil suggest that columns are better and that's why newspapers and the Bible uses it, but you don't have to scroll the content of a newspaper or the bible into view. And we are yet to see any Harry Potter books printed in columns. So why do newspapers and the Bible get away with it? It's because they both use very short sentences. In fact most paragraphs in newspapers consist of just one or two sentences--no more. The abstracts displayed in Cuil search results are much longer than what you'll see in a single sentence or paragraph in a newspaper, so it does benefit from columns the same way newspapers do.
The page has a footer at the bottom of your browser window that does not scroll and overlaps the search results. Again, it might seem like a good idea, but as your eyes follow the content down, rather than getting the usual visual cue that you need to scroll to see more, instead your concentration is interrupted by links to the next page. It encourages you to go to the next page rather than view the rest of the results on the current page.
The header also does not scroll with the page and only serves to reduce the number of results we can see on the screen at any one time. And together with the footer, at first glance you may not realise you can scroll because the scroll bar is absent from the top and bottom of the page. Again, it just serves to alienate Google users.
The other problem is that if you're telling anyone about Cuil, you have to spell it to them if they are ever going to find it. And whilst it's easy to remember the sound, it won't be so easy to remember how to spell it.
These arguments might seem like nit-picking, but Cuil should realise that it's the combination of little things that will prevent people from abandoning a search engine they are familiar and comfortable with.
I don't want to suggest that a competing search engines needs to be the same as Google, I actually wish Google would update their interface, just a bit. But Google's format has worked for a long time and the mass audience doesn't like change. I would like to see Cuil succeed, but I think it's too different to appeal to everyone.
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The central point of Cuil was privacy. Google remembers every search you do, associates it with your IP address, and apparently now provides that information to the government.
If you don't see a problem with that then things are even worse than I thought.
Posted on Wed 12 Nov, 2008
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