So un-Cuil

I'm certainly not the first person to post about the new search engine Cuil (and God knows I'm not the first one to think she's witty using the little play on words for my title). Still, I feel the need to post my two cents about the subject because it's important that someone attempt to level the playing field in the world of information management. Google has, in my humble opinion, become too much of a universal index; a one-stop shop for all your information needs, which may be convenient but far too dangerous to have one company control the access (or lack thereof) to the information on the Internet.

Unfortunately, Cuil has not even come close to leveling the playing field. I know the creators said that their algorithm somehow analyzes content to provide results based more closely on relevance where Google focuses more on popularity. I don't care about algorithms. I care about results I can see, and like all the other librarians across the land, I did a search of my own. I started with a simple search: the Maryland to Kentucky Reunion that the ancestors of many Maryland Catholics attend every couple of years. On Google, the first five results (and, hey, that's more results than most people even look at when searching) using the search terms Maryland to Kentucky give details on the reunion itself or about specific families who were part of the migration. And on Cuil? I couldn't find anything on the first four pages so I gave up. I refined the search by typing "reunion" at the end, which did not provide a link to the latest reunion site, but did bring up a link to the 2002 reunion (which, oddly enough, is the only one I've attended). I've heard from others as well who did these sort of side-by-side comparisons that Cuil didn't even come a close second to Google in their books.

I do like some of the features that Cuil has including the tabs that break a concept down into more specific categories to refine your search. Typing in "Scotland" provides tabs for maps of Scotland, the Bank of Scotland, Scotland Yard, etc. So hopefully Cuil will take the feedback (which I'm sure they've gotten plenty by now) to continue to tweak their algorithm so that one day they can live up to their name.