Cuil doesn't cull and isn't cool

There is a new search engine that is the brainchild of some ex Googlers. the search engine is called Cuil, and is pronounced “cool.”

It may search 121,617,892,992 web pages and have a nice interface -black is more my preference for screen background - but when searching for references to "Mike Wood Photography" or mikewoodphotography.com, it hangs either when the search term is in quotes or not, and one search took 40 seconds for results to Google's .47 seconds. And stalled regularly between page results when going back and forth. Eventually (and curiously after posting a comment on the Globe and Mail ROB article here) I got this result and nothing more:

We didn’t find any results for “mike wood photography”

Some reasons might be...

* a typo. Please check your spelling.
* your search includes a term that is very rare. Try to find a more common substitute.
* too many search terms. Please try fewer terms.

Finally, try to think of different words to describe your search.

I guess Google's 33000 results when I search that are no good. And yes I know some are not all relevant and there are other Mike Wood's who do photography so it gets mixed in the results, but at least Google can find me. :)

Additionally, as I am a photographer, the results 'paragraphs' come with strange place holder images that are not my images and have nothing to do with my work - I don't want my work associated with the drivers license like images that I see; scanning two or three newspaper columns of results is not easy on the eyes when doing fast searches and too few results on a page; my domain does not come up in the first dozen pages - and should come up as most relevant in the search results; this blog never came up in the first 20 pages; many of the results have blurbs related to an image I may have posted but then go to a 404 website or an unrelated and perhaps paid advertising redirect...

All in all, it is a curiosity and nothing more. Not a useful tool at this point. Get rid of the newspaper columns, have options to search blogs/images/news, advanced Boolean searches, more results/relevant results/ less verbose results per page, and more servers for quicker results... Oh wait. I am describing Google. :)

Oh and as an update the day after I posted the comment on the ROB article, Google had indexed it and I found my post on Google. Not on Cuil.

Mike

Mike Wood Photography