Sometimes a picture is worth a thousand words–and then sometimes it isn’t, as Blogoscoped’s Philipp Lenssen points out pretty vividly. Using Cuil to search on some famous people–like Bill Clinton and Boris Becker–can lead to some amusing results.
A search on Cuil for Bill Clinton provides the proper text together with a photo of former New York state governor George Pataki, while a search for Boris Becker results in the right text accompanied by a photo of another notable tennis great, Andre Agassi. While Lenssen cautions that the posted results are not exactly a representative sampling, he also notes that they’re not that rare on Cuil either.
“Cuil gets it right sometimes – but it also doesn’t take long to compile these errors,” Lenssen says.
It’s too bad. Cuil launched with a lot of promise, but it’s been bashed widely since Day 1. While there is still time to tweak the search engine and fix the obvious bugs, getting past the initial bad press just makes its gargantuan task of challenging Google all that much harder.
