A mate was twittered about the results on Cuil for a search for lolcat. Note that it wasn’t a search for lolcats plural. Just lolcat singular.

You’d think that would be worksafe. But it’s not.

The fact that Cuil displays an image next to each website in the results list, can lead to nasty surprises.
They need to have some kind of reporting and instant removal of unpleasant images.
I would not be happy for my kids to see the image returned.
It’s not for the official lolcats site - icanhascheezburger.com. It’s a different site. No need to mention it. But it’s adult.

On a related note, I can imagine people experimenting to see how they can control the image that is displayed next to their website. Getting a shocking image displayed could be a kind of linkbait - traffic attention-seeking.

As with all search engines, SEOs will be attempting to reverse-engineer the algorithm, to see how they can get their results at the top. Yet another area for people to specialise in. It will be interesting to see how much traffic Cuil gets. Fairly negative feedback so far.

Just heard about the new search engine, Cuil. Well it ain’t.

The logical first step was to search for my own sites. Especially those that rank well at the traditional major search engines.

sydney web design - www.sydney-web-design.com managed page 6 at cuil. Pity they couldn’t find the right web site image to display. Not sure why they displayed ireckon’s instead. Fail.

online shopping australia - gee, it displayed my old domain, best-australian.com, on page 1. Shucks, it even had my own content. Strange though. That content hasn’t existed since November 2007. Is that when they spidered it? The new owner only has crap ads. Fail.

mydogspace - well the .com.au doesn’t get a mention for a few pages. Strange. It’s number 1 at Google. And you’d have to say pretty relevant. Fail.

halloween australia - Cuil displays my sydney-web-design site. Cos I list my halloween site in my portfolio. Pity they didn’t have enough nous to display the actual relevant site. Fail.

Even more annoying is the way the data appears on my screen. I have a modest 17 inch screen. The bottom few rows of Cuil don’t fit on my screen, and I have to page down all the time. And the links to the next search results are so small you miss them at first.

Getting close to epic fail cuil guys.