Ryan MacMillan

I’ve given it a day and Cuil the soi-dissant Anti-Google still sucks. From the choice of black as the background color (”See? we are the anti-google! Black! To their white!!!” ) through to the inescapable fact that it doesn’t really work, it sucks. All day, everytime I needed to google something, I forced my self to use cuil - note, do, that ‘to cuil’ is in no way a neologism that is ever going to take off - and each and everytime it failed to give me what I was looking for. It sucks because it isn’t useful. It sucks for all the reasons that the kids over at Metafilter list in infinite detail. It sucks because it just doesn’t seem to add value. I kept asking myself how, even when the wretched thing wasn’t working (as for most of the day it wasn’t), it would outdo Google if it were working. Call me hoplessly lacking in imagination, but I really couldn’t see it. It’s not that I didn’t want cuil to work - I get as vexed by the google hegemon as anyone else. But… Time and again, I went back to Google which, usefully, did what I wanted. Nice that.

And the name… ugggh. ‘Cuil’ as pronounced ‘Cool’? This is surely the ass-stabbingly worst incidence of web2.0 whimsy ever committed to the web.

So yeah, cuil - not so much.

(Update: 404 links fixed)