31 July 2008

Google competitor - really?

A new search engine called "Cuil" - the names get weirder and more unpronouncable! - is getting some publicity at the moment. It's been on the BBC Technology site and now Jack Schofield of the Guardian has an article on the subject. The article has generated quite a lot of discussion, which is worth having a look at. I can't say that I'm impressed: I've just tried searching for "information research" and it comes up with 'No results were found for: "information research"' Very strange! When I remove the inverted commas, I get results, but some of them are odd and I wonder if Information Research is actually scanned by the service. This feeling is increased when I search for titles of papers in the journal and find nothing - so perhaps the vaunted "biggest search engine" isn't really doing a very good job? There are also weird things going on, for example, a photograph is attached to the entry for this Weblog, but it isn't a picture of me! In fact, the same pictures are placed on the page in other places in relation to completely different topics - I've no clue as to what is going on here, but it doesn't fill me with either confidence or enthusiasm. I'll stick to Google.

No comments:

Post a Comment