Cuil And Counting Crows

I try not to jump on the hot news stories unless I have something meaningful to add. So I honestly wasn't that interested in jumping on the bandwagon to bash (or praise) the new search engine Cuil (pronounced "cool").



That said, I was a bit curious about it and after playing with it, I have to say I think in might be, well, cool.



My test case was an actual search  I wanted to do this morning. On Thursday, I am going to see my old high school friend Adam Duritz and his band the Counting Crows at Jones Beach. I haven't spoken to him since last year's reunion, and I remembered that at that time he was working on a new record, which I must confess, as of this morning, I hadn't purchased yet -- Its the startup grind that makes you forget to do stuff like that.



And so this morning, I wanted to check out the record, and to see what else might have been going on that I might have missed. So instead of Googling Counting Crows, I used Cuil. And I have to say I really liked the results.



It wasnt that it provided sites that I wouldnt have found with Google. It was that it helped put things in context. It really is, in a sense, about the user interface.

The the intriguing part of Cuil is the little panel in the top right of the screen, shown above, that lets me explore interesting information about the search subject.  You can click on the different tabs, and the slick widget lets you explore different areas like the groups songs, albums, or band members. Now I have to admit, much of the information here could have been more easily found on Wikipedia. But having it available in a search engine where you can enhance your search based on information you didn't already have is very valuable, particularly if, as I assume, the overviews are built without human intervention. I can imagine in less mainstream subject areas this could be even more powerful.



To be clear, this is far from a review, because I only did one other search, which was for cooking fish, as I no longer eat meat and so definitely need to improve my skills in this area. Again the fish cooking overview was particularly helpful in this case since I was not even aware of all the valid ways to cook fish.



So the bottom line is I certainly like the idea behind Cuil. If they can provide decent search results, which others are saying is problematic, then their user interface is certainly a very appealing advantage. I can easily imagine that Cuil could become a part of my search engine mix alongside my current champs, with Google obviously in the lead, and Hakia in second place, doing a very good job with natural language search when keywords are not enough.