New Search Engine Cuil: Is This What You're Looking For?

Kevin Maney searches for better search: A new Google competitor, manned by a bunch of ex-Google people, is making its debut. It's called Cuil and pronounced "cool," which right there is one confusing strike against it in the word-of-mouth campaign.

How does it stack up? Well, that might depend on how you define success. TechCrunch did some testing and found that Google returns way more results -- like, in a search for "dog," Cuil turned in 280 million results, but Google showed 498 million. Personally, I'm pretty exhausted after about the first 100 results, so I don't think I'd ever get to enjoy Google's 218 million advantage there.

I just took a very quick stab at Cuil, which left me...confused. First I did what any self-respecting individual would do: I typed in my own name. What I got back seemed random and ill-organized. The results show a chunk of text from the beginning of each Web page, but since that text is often snippets of titles, headlines, menus and such, it reads like a scramble of e.e. cummings poems. And Cuil creates categories on the fly and posts them in the upper right of the page, supposedly to help you quickly narrow your search. In my vanity search, two categories returned were "Grammy Award winners" and "American rock guitarists." Under neither heading am I, personally, listed.

After that, I typed "Gilmore Girls." I'm not telling you why. But I got the message, "We didn't find any results for 'Gilmore Girls.'" Game over. Google wins.