First and foremost: Didn’t Cuil have two ‘L’ s in it yesterday? Seriously. I was thrown off by that this morning.

 

 

Nextly: When I read this post on Webware about what Cuil (pronounced, oddly enough, Cool…even though with the spelling—both new and old— this sort of pronunciation is both random and odd) is supposed to be, I was kind of surprised by how off the mark it the actual product comes out.

 

What it’s supposed to be:

 

“The most important difference between Cuil and Google is its ranking system. Rather than assigning priority to pages based on inbound links as Google does (“Pagerank”), Cuil analyzes the content of Web pages to divine their relevance to a search query. Costello bristled when I asked if this was a semantic search engine like PowerSet (recently sold to Microsoft). Costello said Cuil’s search is “contextual,” and that, “we’re trying to understand the real world, not the Web.”  

 

What it is:

 

Understandably, I am only a layperson. (Despite having recently enjoyed 30 microseconds of internet fame by making onto a Valleywag list of top 50 hottest Digg girls—what?!) However, laypeople make up the core of most consumer populations, no? We can’t all be geeks who understand how contextual relates to semantic or how it differs from popularity rankings. In this way, then, what laypeople care about is the search—how will one service serve them better than another?

 

This being said, the first search that I (naturally!) tried this morning was for my own name. Indeed, vanity supersedes any sort of intellectual inquiry. Imagine how disappointed I was when the first result was “Miguel Grinberg?” Aside from how Pagerank works and all the other explanations I’ve been reading—search term relevance means the search result, especially the first result, should be as pertinent to the query terms as possible! So how is Miguel Grinberg more relevant than the actual search terms, which showed up in later results?

 

That’s my beef #1.

 

But there’s more. My name [and I know this because of the number of vanity searches I’ve run on Google in the past…my love of myself truly knows no bounds, :::pbfft::] typically will yield varied results—there are hits to school, where I’m a part of a couple of organizations, there are several hits back to RM mag, linking directly to published stories, and even to bNet and zDnet, cataloguing some other published articles. Relevant to my name? I’d like to think so.

 

What did Cuil show me? Several pages from my outdated Pownce account, and some more results for random Grinbergs. Best part of all—one of the images that displayed with the result was spam! “Try Majestic—its Free!” was a little thumbnail image that showed up next to a result for one of the posts to my Pownce account. The inclusion of images with the search results is supposed to be fresh, innovative, helpful. Spam, though? Hardly helpful.

 

What’s up, Cuil?

 

Even more appalling—internet people, you might appreciate this more because I was trying to do an objective search, realizing that searching mine and the boyfriend’s names and respective internet aliases might not yield the most (giggle) relevant results—I did a search for “television.” Imagine a layperson, some “Middle American” Joe Nobody, doing a search on his home PC for some information on televisions, as he is looking to buy one. Not being proficient with computing or the rich and varied functions of the interwebz, he types in the lone word “television” as his query in a search box. Google turns up a Wikipedia entry on television, a TV Guide, TV listings, all the jazz you would expect. You can even buy a television, from the paid ads on the right.

 

Cuil yields results, too, of course, but they aren’t as handy. The first one is CBS, followed by other specific stations, then some result called “Tandberg Television” and other such—dare I say it—useless linkage. The tabs on top? More useless links to TV stations. The tabs in the funky and “functional” drop down menus on the right? More channels.

 

Finally, let me put the cherry on the sundae for ya. I decided to give Cuil the benefit of the doubt and smartened up my John Nobody. Instead of just searching for “Television,” John became wise enough to get more specific about what he wants to do: my query became “Buy television.”

 

And the thumbnail image that showed itself behind one of the search results in the third column, on the right? The thumbnail for “Beware of Buying …Television” was a very clear screen shot of some serious, serious porn.

 

Whoa, Cuil. Whoa.

 

I did more searches, natch, and the relevance factor of the results is low. I can’t picture myself using this engine for anything other than comparative snickering, unless it magically refines its algorithms to generate SUCH relevant results it seems to be reading my mind. I guess this means that I am a Google girl, and I suspect, the rest of the search consumers of the world are too. (Even if they’re boys.)

 

To say that popularity is not important in the arena of search results is to deny that people understand what it is they’re searching for– things get popular with pageviews, with eyeballs. People click through to search results when they are relevant to the query– lots of click throughs indicate relevance, and lots of click throughs also begin to indicate popularity.

 

When you subtract one term from the other, you get some faux-intuitive results which really, at this point, have little to do with what you were looking for. If it doesn’t catch on quick, I’m expecting some huge trick up their sleeve.

 

And to the final note? Targeting lay people all over the world is key— build your market out of real people, there are more of them than there are geeks. Not only will laypeople not be able to pronounce Cuil, but once they’re told once, twice, three times how its supposed to be said, how will they remember to spell it properly? There’s not the littlest bit of user intuition possible there. Gonna make them search it on Google? THAT seems helpful.

 

Whats UP, Cuil?!