Review: Cuil
Cuil is a new search engine that went live today. Its goal is to provide more search results with greater accuracy than existing search engines such as Google. Currently it indexes over 120 billion web pages, which is substantially lower than Google’s claim of 1 Trillion unique web pages. Cuil was founded by former Google employees Anna Patterson, Russel Power, Louis Monier, and former IBM employee Tom Costello.
Cuil has some positive qualities, but currently it is not polished enough to replace my preferred search engine, Google.
Pros
- UI: I tend to like darker screen user interfaces than most people, so I especially liked the contrasting black, dark, blue, and white elements. Actually, it fits nicely with the theme of my blog. Overall, the look and feel seems uncluttered, which is largely due to the multi-column view search results. This seems to prevents excessive scrolling when browsing the results.
- Search Categories: When searching for “Seattle”, it divided the search into suggestions that were common for this search. Results included “Seattle Culture”, “Landmarks in Seattle”, etc. Below each category were listed search terms that fit into these categories.
Cons
- Search Results: Several searches that I often do, returned results that were not useful to me. Typing in my own name, “Erik Turnquist”, did not return my website, nor ericturnquist.com which always occurs when searching google. When searching for “Soccer wiki”, “Digg wiki”, “California wiki”, or even “California wikipedia”, did not return a single search result that had Wikipedia. This is highly personal, but searches I do often proved to return useless results.
- Load Times: Page load times were far too long. Using Webkit r35417, searching for “Apple” took 8.20 seconds, compared to Google’s 355 milliseconds.
Although Cuil is currently having scaling and relevancy issues, I assume that many of those problems will be worked out over time. Conclusion: stick with Google.
Google Transit: Seattle
I’ve known for a while that Google Maps has had the ability to plan bus routes in the bay area, but did not know that it also works for Seattle. This includes both King County Metro and Sound Transit. Here is a little how to on using the service.
Go to maps.google.com and click on the “Get Directions” link. In my I want to go from the Paul G. Allen Center to Pike Place Market. After I click the “Get Directions” button it shows me how to drive from my starting point to my destination. However you can click “Public Transit” directly below “Search Results” to be shown which bus routes allow you to get to your destination. Below is a photo showing my search results.
It tells me that I can take the 68 to the 73. Cool! Also listed are alternate departure times and buses that I could take to get to my destination. Under “Options” I can also specify my Depart Time or Arrival Time.
What I especially enjoy about this is being able to see exactly where the bus route will take me, as well as where I need to catch the bus and where it drops me off. A significant improvement over Trip Planner if you ask me.
For a list of all cities supported, go to Google Transit.