Cuil is the new talking vacuum cleaner

Today’s Financial Times technology briefing heralds the advent of a new search engine: Cuil which boasts to have indexed three times as many web pages as Google. Must be worth a look ,I thought, so I tried a bit of ego surfing and was quickly but completely underwhelmed by cuil.com.

The search results show that cuil is about as much use as the old talking vacuum cleaners.

Let me explain my comment. Twenty years ago, when combining voice and technology was first cool, a major manufacturer produced a talking vacuum cleaner.

Unfortunately its vocabulary did not include really useful comments, such as “move your feet,” “I cleaned this yesterday and look at it now, you mucky sods!” or “why can’t you pick up your own rubbish…” instead the wonder machine meekly opined: “bag is full, check bag.”

Wow, a talking vacuum cleaner without anything interesting to say. So what?

Well the point is that somebody in a major corporation  had thought it worthwhile to apply expensive technology resources to produce a product that delivered no real value to the customer.

Especially as the limited vocabulary was expressed through an underpowered speaker, close to the vacuum cleaner’s motor – itself being rather louder, making it impossible for the user to hear the machine’s miserable bleating without stooping dramatically. Hardly an effective application of technology.

I have used the talking vaccum cleaner in my seminars and workshops to illustrate the point that just because we can do something with technology, doesn’t mean we should. The effective application of technology must always serve a truly useful and appropriate purpose.

My experience with the cuil search engine shows that the lessons of the talking vacuum cleaner have not been learned. Cuil claims to have more references but the search results are way less effective than mature competitor search engines.

Cuil associates images with search results in an apparently random and arbitrary manner, in an effort to make the search results more visually appealing. The results can be bizarre. Try it yourself – search for “talking vacuum cleaner” and cuil will claim nearly ten million hits (a thousand times more than another well-known search engine.)

To sum up cuil, it’s simply another me-too product, with hopes of attracting advertising revenue from traffic. It produces poor results and it doesn’t move the technology forward.

Cuil is a missed opportunity, or perphaps more bluntly, as we say in Yorkshire: it’s just a good-looking nowt.