Not Cuil, either

The Brits at The Register weigh in on the new Cuil site, and they're not pleased, either: "In fairness, most concluded that Cuil would not be a 'Google Killer'. But the pondering over its chances would be laughable if it weren't so boring. We offered brief coverage of the launch to note that the results are a bit rubbish, and in some cases obscene. Our second report lifts the lid on the company's cake budget... It's easy to identify what happened. When it first surfaced in 1998, Google made sense of the web a bit better than anyone else. It was a useful improvement on existing services. Ten years later, the web does its best to make sense of Google. The sorry upshot is that barring some unimaginable technological leap no search engine's results will ever be better than Google's, at least in the West. And the switch leaves the likes of Microsoft and Cuil (and a dozen other doomed start-ups) effectively attempting to reverse-engineer Google, not understand the information on the web. Microsoft's recent purchase of natural language search start-up Powerset should provide a case in point. Like many others hungry for a slice of the hugely profitable contextual search advertising business Google has created, Powerset's founders are betting web users want to ask search engines real grammatical questions. But keyword searches, which the vast majority are adept at now, are faster for users. So the web has adapted to attract their, and Google's, attention... Now is probably a good time to abandon any hope of a benevolent Google dictatorship. In toughening economic times, we're already seeing the firm being tempted to abuse its immense power to prevent its halo slipping in the eyes of Wall Street. Do no evil became a bad joke long ago, but its latest move to multiply its customers' search advertising costs on the sly by co-opting them into its new Ad Matching programme is low by any standard. But don't blame Google's executives. It's just what monopolies do."

Rico says he'll be happy to switch to something better, once someone builds something better. The problem is, the only one doing that is Google itself... (And there's that splendid British use of the word 'rubbish' again.)