Some are calling Cuil a "Google killer," don't know about that, but I am excited because within hours of the Cuil launch I received my first referral to this blog. As I have been lax about blogging recently, and haven't checked the stats too meticulously, not sure how many more have come in.
But lets take a look at Cuil. Is it a Google killer? Well, since Google has managed to earn billions of dollars and have not paid a dividend, unless Cuil can suck out money from a bank account, it will not kill Google. Like Microsoft, its cash hoard will keep it from being killed anytime soon.
But is a better search engine? Who knows.
But does it deliver a better user experience? Well, maybe. Google has not changed its interface since it started. The "UI" of Google was the anti-UI. I remember in the day of dial-up (yes, been at this way too long) Google was preferred over Yahoo! b/c Jerry and the gang had made Yahoo! front page too busy, and took way too long to load. Well all you wanted was to quickly search the web for something, it was overkill. Google stuck to KISS (Keep It Simple Stupid). And it worked. Even the ads are just text. No rich media, just text. Up to the present day.
But those long strings of text results do get boring...and have not improved at all in effectiveness in quite some time.
What did Cuil do? They put the top search results in nice boxes with more of the result wb page text appearing (the image thing doesn't really work yet). Nicer? Sure. Too busy? Maybe. For somebody like me, who is a speed reader and started conducting searches using LEXIS/NEXIS and boolean scripts, don't really need the nice boxes.
But I didn't need a blue computer case either, that didn't stop Steve Jobs from saving his company by making the same computer blue and selling a lot more of them...
Too early to say Cuil is a contender, but at least it will push the Googlers to make some progress beyond what we have today.
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