There’s a new player on the search engine scene: Cuil, the brand spankin’ new startup that claims to index faster and cheaper than Google. It has a three column layout is a bold step towards a more mature web, and for that I give Cuil kudos. However, as this bold initiatives is a success, there is another that is a massive failure the addition of thumbnail photos.
Cuil appears to pull images that share the same keyword search terms and inject them as thumbnails floated in the content description for the primary search results. In other words, pictures are being associated with sites that they have no connection to… as seen here:
It’s a bold idea, and with some much more fine-tuned filtering, it could work, but the results at launch are too generic and error prone. In this case, this is not the Selena that this site is about, but the singer Selena. People searching for this blog will also be confused why the legendary singer is pictured, and question whether they found the right site. In Cuil’s over-zealous attempt to provide a richer search result, the listing has become much more confusing.
