What’s the deal with Cuil?

July 29, 2008

Everybody seems to want to talk about Cuil, the new search engine in town.  So here are my two cents.

Like most publishers, I started searching for some of my own sites, including my company site.  If you search for “XAdvance web” (searching for XAdvance alone seems to ignore the “X”), you get this in the results.  I have one question for Cuil — who is this woman?

I don’t know her.  She’s got nothing to do with XAdvance.  So what’s the deal? It might be interesting to learn how Cuil chooses these images. Also, the title and some of the content are several months old.

As I write this, I can see another publisher, Patrick O’Keefe is going through something similar.  He points to his blog (via Twitter) where his sites are also paired with irrelevant images.

Cuil, pronounced “cool”, surfaced yesterday with claims of an index larger than Google’s.  It’s been developed largely by former Google employees, along with some from IBM, eBay and others.

We’ll have to see what happens as the search engine takes shape–after all, it’s brand new.  But for the moment, I don’t see its format or results replacing Google anytime soon.

I wonder who will be the first to publish some new SEO practices for it.  It looks like there’s already enough spam on there.

I'm Colin and I'm a Senior Analyst at Napkyn Inc, leading a team of business analysts who support the decision-makers in major online retailers, software companies and sales organizations.

I'm also a philosophy student and teaching assistant at the University of Ottawa. I'm interested in philosophical logic, as well as philosophy of logic, science and mathematics.

Opinions expressed here may not reflect those of my employers or my school.

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