Cuil has just gone live a couple of hours ago, tauting to be the next best thing since Google. A search engine that wants to challenge Google the way Google did on Yahoo, how nice is Cuil?

Usability - Fly Hunting

First, before I go into it, let’s find out how Google shoved Yahoo and Altavista into the dirt. It practically owned them with its search algorithm, and an oversimplified interface that screams “I’m a fucking search engine” compared to Yahoo’s confusion of identity bordering between an internet yellow pages and a search engine. Which is fine, its just that Google’s easier to use in terms of usability.

So what about Cuil? Let’s see this in a usability standpoint. The moment you pull up a search in Cuil, it gives you a page with 3 columns of search results.

PHAIL.

What you want in a search engine is something that catches your attention immediately. That is why Google didn’t try to change how Yahoo and Altavista displayed its results - in one single column. Cuil tried to change that and shoved 3 columns into your face, all of it which screams Information Overload.

Overloading the user with information is a good way to fail, regardless of how strong your algorithm is. Perhaps Cuil wanted to put more search results in one screen without having the user scroll down to see the full list, but spreading it out in 3 columns just don’t work.

You see, when a user sees a page, the user will have to start somewhere. At this point, you’ll want your users’ eyes to travel in one direction on the core content on that site, so that they’d feel productive and not feel lost. But if you have 3 columns, you create a dilemma - to start horizontall or vertically? This usually leads to the common phenomenon known as the fly hunt, where the user’s eyes dart all over the place in a random pattern, taking in much less information despite the increased amount of information you manage to shove into one page.

This is why sites that have too many sidebars (flashing ones, most of them) distract the user from the core content. This is also why people lose interest quickly with awkward interfaces, and Cuil had just committed the gravest error in search engine usability.

Search - inferior

I typed in “monkey brains” and on the first page, there’s only one article referring to the monkey brains that I queried. The others point to albums and songs.

Next, the shocker. I typed in “food review” and got… ZERO results! After pulling myself up from the ground, I tried again with “food reviews” with an extra “s”, and got what I want.

WHAT. THE. FUCK.

If this is how anal their “search” algorithm is, then I’d stick to Google for a long time.

Until then, perhaps there’s more to Cuil than horrible usability, and perhaps I’ll be able to say something good about Cuil in the future.

But I doubt it.

This entry was posted on Monday, July 28th, 2008 at 3:02 pm and is filed under Reviews. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.