When are we going to see a new search engine that blows us away? Not today.

Having a series of vanity queries armed and ready for quick testing of new search engine, Cuil, I chuckled at one of the prominent results of querying tdavid’s blog. Look, there are two of four results (50%!!!) for my aging, forgotten, seldom used Netscape.com profile page:

LOL, one result is a freaking PHP array dump! Where’s the QA testing? Thanks for the chuckle, Cuil. If not for the humor of seeing this PHP array dump, I’d probably never have written this post. An array dump for non-developer readers is the contents of an array output to the browser page. Something that should never be shown in a totally unrelated search result like my vanity search above.

People can argue against basing the quality of search engine results on vanity searches, but in my experience you should search for something that you know the best results and I can tell you with 100% authority that a search for ‘tdavid’s blog’ should not reveal results for dead netscape.com profile pages and PHP array dumps. Ok, Cuil gets a few points for getting this blog as the top left blog, but they lose on every other result on the page. Clipmarks? Metacafe? Performancing? Political Base? Those aren’t my ‘blogs’  nor any place I’d recommending sending anybody looking for my blogs. Heck, Cuil would be more timely using my FriendFeed or Twitter pages, both of which have been updated in the last 24 hours.

I don’t know what the Cuil bot is smoking, but it must be some good stuff.

Don’t even get me started on people foolishly, predictably comparing this to Google. Cuil has a few small things going for it: one is that the search results are not the traditional search results that too many SE are copying from each other these days. But having scaling problems at launch is rarely anything to be excited about (and I’m not helping by piling on with this post, sorry Cuil).

I wrote earlier on a FriendFeed comment my feelings on THE search engine that will someday replace Google. The only thing I’d amend in the following quote is that it could be two PEOPLE, not only "guys." Think I’ll go back and edit that to say ‘people’ instead. It is cool (that’s what ‘cuil’ sounds like) to see that Cuil was created by a husband wife team like Flickr:

The next true "Google killer" (and I despise the use of the ‘killer’ label) will be two guys in their garage somewhere, just like the original Google and it will look *nothing* like the current search engines. We haven’t seen it yet, but will someday and it will blow us away.

I can’t wait for the day to read and write about this search engine. The search continues.

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