oh, cuil

Hip new search engine Cuil launched today, and I was intrigued. It looks nice, I thought. Kinda like the search engine version of Flock - personally, I'm not big on chunky and cute, but damn it if it isn't appealing all the same.

Pity, then, that it runs about as well as a recently blinded fish. How do I test this sort of thing? Search for information about myself, of course. Now, maybe I've got too used to the monstrous Google index, whereby you just whack in random words and out come the highest associations. My first experience of search engines, back in the pre-Google days, was with the now utterly hopeless AltaVista; but, in a shadowy form the service that made it obsolete, it was based on web directory and so the graduation to googling wasn't too much of a shock (unlike the horrors of Lycos and Ask - phrasing your search as question is a little annoying after a while when all you want to find is... well, what do men want (more than a visit from The Rock?) Come on, I was a teenager. (Obviously, as an incredibly employable NQT and media professional, those days are several partitioned hard drives behind me now.)

Cuil can find nothing. I can't work out what the system is it is working on. It looks nice, but nice won't get you anywhere. It's a lot like my MySkip experience. If you can't get your head around it in thirty seconds, the kids move on.

Thankfully, Rory Cellan-Jones has already torn it a new one on the dot.life blog. But still try it: and if you can, work out what it's smoking...

...maybe we can get it out on the streets in Belfast and use it to slow the spides down when they're legging it from the scene of an ASBO. "Wasn't me officer, it was the tosser in the baseball cap who looks like he's sprinting through tar..."

"Cheers, son. You know, that reminds me of a search engine I was using earlier..."