Like I said last week Im trying to get out of the PR game and try to get back to what made me like blogging: sharing information with other users.

So, has anyone figured out a good way to quickly test search engines? I havent. Everyone has their own search terms that they use to judge whether or not an engine is interesting.

I remember when I was trying to convince my dad to move from Alta Vista to Google he had a bunch of very specific scientific searches hed do. He used to love showing me that Alta Vista had more and better results. I kept at it. After about two years he switched to Google too.

Today isnt like back in the Alta Vista days. Back then there was porn and spam that was showing up in my result sets. Google doesnt have those problems and usually works for almost anything I search for. When it doesnt work, I try some of the other engines, or just refactor my search and it almost always works. I cant remember the last time I was totally stymied by Google.

But, whats great about the blogosphere is that everyone gets to participate. Look at TechCrunchs early searches and the comments that are coming in. I, too, think that Cuil is going to face an uphill battle based on my early searches.

On the other hand, lets give Cuil the benefit of the doubt. Lets say it actually was a better search engine. I still doubt many people would switch. Why?

Distribution.

Huh?

Well, my Firefox browser has Google built into it. Most people have no idea how to switch it. Most people, on our tests, really dont understand much of anything except that that little box probably now goes to Google. The Google.

Its so pervasive of an expectation at this point that many people type URLs into that box. Or, type the word Yahoo into that box so they can get to their email and other Yahoo services.

Is Cuil going to be able to get into this game?

No way, no how.

On mobile phones its worse. My iPhone has Google built in. No way that Cuil is going to be able to rip out Google and replace that with its own engine.

So, why is Cuil here?

I think its a play for Microsoft money. Microsoft needs to get back into the search game, so will continue buying companies to try to get back into the search game. Yahoo, if run by management thats rational, will probably start doing the same thing.

Look at Powerset. They cashed out early to Microsoft. Cuil probably will do the same thing if it brings enough to the table.

Just for fun, though, and to get back to being a user, lets try one search:

Barack Obamas technology policy

I put that into all the search engines without any quotes, just to see which one does the best job. Heres the result set:

Cuil (gave an error, couldnt find any results)
Google. (best of the three)
Yahoo. (close to Google, but not quite there)
Microsoft. (by far the worst of the big three, didnt bring the technology policy up as the first result).

Anyway, I did a bunch of other searches on Cuil and they are trying to be different, thats for sure, but I didnt see enough of a need to try it out further.

How about you?

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