Cuil followup

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Still not impressed

You know how websites launch these days with a little “beta” badge stuck somewhere to indicate they’re still working out the kinks? Usually it’s a cop-out or an affectation. (I mean, come on, Google. Gmail is, what, 4 years old and still in beta?) Cuil really would’ve helped themselves with a beta release. As it is, they’ve launched with a seemingly finished product that is crashing and burning.

Okay, maybe I jumped the gun a bit on the “education technology copywriter” search, because some results are seeding now. None of them are for copywriters specializing in education technology (at least, not on the first page), but there are some results.

I went 20 pages in on Cuil results on my name…

…and was underwhelmed with what I found.

Cuil found lots of old Usenet posts, lots of posts to forums dating from the early 90s, lots of Twitter users who follow me, and lots of my comments on others’ blogs. And as I went in the 20 pages, I saw many of these results were repeated over the pages.

Now, how many of those results on those 20 pages were for this blog, or any of the pages here on my site?

None.

Okay, this page doesn’t have the highest Google pagerank. I’ll grant that. Maybe I just don’t use my own name around here enough. I don’t know. But if someone searching for me can’t find my own website in 20 pages on a search engine, something isn’t working right.

(In contrast, when searching Google for my own name, I am 9.5 of the first 10 results (I shared one with other Matt Tuleys in this country. Who knew?))

Maybe next timel

I wanted to like this new Google alternative from former Googlers, but I just can’t. It just doesn’t work that well. Will they be able to fix it and bring it up to speed? Maybe, but they’ve got a lot of negative press and word-of-mouth to overcome now, so it will be tough.

Oh, well.