Admit it, from time to time you’ve Googled your name. This morning, I searched for my name on the new search engine Cuil, and wasn’t happy with the results.
Cuil, founded by former Google employees, touts that it furnishes a more complete search engine with more pertinent results compared with competitors, including Google. Cuil systematizes Web pages by content, and presents paragraph-length entries for each result. It contends to have a larger index than any other search engine, with about 120 billion Web pages. Cuil officially began offering its search service today.
But when I keyword searched “Eric Chabrow,” Cuil provided the fewest returns among major search engines:
Cuil 3,805
Google 8,730
MSN 12,100
Yahoo 233,000
More important, as the best judge of what’s relevant to Eric Chabrow, I felt the results Cuil provided the least pertinent to the subject, me.
Cuil’s first result was a link to a video blog posting I created about two years ago at a former employer, one which I had forgotten about. The second item was an article I had written nearly six years ago for that same former employer, but reposted on a Web site I never heard of [I don’t know if that site got permission to repost the copyrighted story]. I have no recollection of that story. [I’ve written thousands of items posted online over that past decade, and can’t recall all of them.]
In fact, of the 11 items Cuil had on the first results page, only one linked to CIOInsight.com, and that was a link to a video report from this past January.
Google’s first four results were more recent than those offered up by Cuil, including three to CIOInsight.com or its publisher, Ziff Davis Enterprise. The fourth was to my LinkedIn entry.
Four of MSN’s top five choices also were for recent content. At Yahoo, five of seven involved relatively recent items, including links to my YouTube page.
Cuil, in this test, didn’t live up to its promise of relevancy and total numbers. You should take the test, and when done, let us know below what you found.
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