Cuil Steps Up to the Plate and Strikes Out

People love to take aim at leading brands, and almost nobody has a bigger target on their back than Google. Launching a competing search engine these days almost guarantees news coverage, but often doesn't deserve it. The challenger-du-jour today is Cuil, which claimed to launch with three times the number of indexed pages as Google.

I checked out Cuil and was thoroughly unimpressed. It took me less than thirty seconds to come up with three big strikes for Cuil:

Strike 1: Name - I have no idea how to pronounce this name. Is it "Quill", "Kweel", "Quell", "Coil"? I fully realize that it is almost the Holy Grail to have a four letter domain name, but from a branding standpoint, if you have a brand that people don't know how to pronounce, it's very hard to spread by word of mouth. Add to that the fact that no matter how you say it in casual conversation, nobody would be able to guess how to spell it, and this seems like a bad branding move for Cuil.

Plus, on top of that, while Google's name (which is arguably a more intuitive spelling than the actual word it is based on) has symbolism in reference to what it does, the best I can find for Cuil is an acronym "CUIL" standing for "Common Usage Item List". Ironically, this acronym is anything but commonly used.

Strike 2: Interface - Some other reviewers and myself will have to agree to disagree on this topic. Cuil's approach of presenting multiple columns of paragraphs which are not cleanly aligned is unintuitive and hard to visually navigate. I cannot tell if the second most relevant result is supposed to be the top result in the second column or the second result in the left column. The need for a user to scan Cuil results BOTH left-to-right and top-to-bottom makes it much harder to process and know one's place when moving through multiple pages of results.

Strike 3: Results - The third strike for Cuil, and the most devastating, is its seemingly anemic ability to find results. This is the meat-and-potatoes for a search engine and it does not perform well at all. While a search for "Singularity" did turn up results (and a listing for Singularity Design), a search for "Singularity Design" turned up nothing (no, I didn't use the quotation marks in my search either). Likewise, there were no results for "award-winning design firm", "wide plank flooring" or "weather 19103".

This is a fatal flaw for a search engine in my book. I don't care how many pages a search engine indexes if it cannot process a large number of my searches. Everyone is learning that the trick to getting the right answer is to ask the right question, and Cuil doesn't seem to be able to grasp those questions.

Search term: "successful competitor to Google in search"

No results found.