I’m back from the depths with a desire to blog aroused by a BBC article stating that three former Google employees started a neat search engine that is better at crawling by placing websites in context and, supposedly, displays search results using a fashioned, magazine-style layout.
Go over at cuil.com (it’s read “cool”) and you will be greeted with a crammed, blue-on-black, sparse interface that looks odd and does not satisfy. I am encountering a css problem with one of my projects at the moment, and I need to find out how to make a div container to stretch in height to 50% of its parent’s height. So I enter “css div 50% height” as my first query, one which I knew from before Google would understand. Surprised, I got an error page. Playing around with it more, I realized it’s not into phrases. So I tried a word: “typography”. Hmm, no results.
Well, I like one thing about it: their Switchy McLayout really works, changing from a three-column to a two-column on the fly. Other than that, the magazine layout is not spectacular, and the fact that they use static positioning really kills the mood. The categories accordion is really nice, apart from the fact that it doesn’t work. I don’t know how this site got promoted by BBC. Maybe it has something to do with the same fellow that said “yes, this web 2.0 re-design is EXACTLY what we need!”.
I think some people still need to understand the Google lesson that truth is in simplicity. Cuil is a fancy directory of websites masked as a search engine. It could benefit from the fresh look that was indented for it, but it certainly does not benefit from the lack of design simplicity and minimalism that lets the UI speak for itself and makes content the centrepiece. Design decisions like static positioning, the ugly homepage, logo on the right (magazine layout… really?), tabs that are not supposed to be there, accordion that should be a tag cloud and so on so forth, really defeat the purpose. Tell you what, take Google and add a little tag cloud of related subjects next to the super-functional results list and you’ve got it. Hmm, I should do that, I wonder if it’s possible.