I just found out about a new search engined called cuil, started by some former google engineers. It’s supposed to be better than google, of course, so I decided to take it for a test ride. It sucked. I typed in the name Julián Corres, an Argentine torturer who recently escaped from a police station. They didn’t have one single hit related to him. I tried the name of various disappeared people that we feature in Proyecto Desaparecidos – there were no hits for them either. And this from a search engine that claims that has more indexed pages than google.
I tried googling family members names. Mine gave results similar to those in google – but there were only 3 hits for Michaela’s – and none to pages with much relevancy.
Cuil has this “cool” feature in that along with page summaries, it provides pictures that supposedly, illustrate your search. But the pictures are pretty random. Type Mike Katz and you won’t find any links to my Mike Katz’ pages – but you will see a picture next to a link to a singer with his name. WTF!
Anyway, I do wish that someone would come up with a better search engine than google. I know that google has great limitations, as when I search for my name it gives me a link to an article I sent to a mailing list over a decade ago – not the most relevant of informations (cuil, btw, does the same thing). But cuil, unfortunately, is not it.