Ah, thanks to Melina and Vernon for giving me three days in a row off from trying to think of something interesting to say. You might think that would mean I’d be able to jump in with something witty and charming today. You would, of course, be wrong.

Among all the other things that went on this week, you may or may not have noticed the launch of Cuil (pronounced “cool”). It’s an attempt by a bunch of ex-Google engineers to “out-Google” Google. They had a pretty successful pre-launch marketing campaign, I guess. So successful that the site crashed and burned when reviewers and other curious folks went to the site to see how it matched up to the other search sites out there.

I have my own methods for testing search sites, so I set out to evaluate Cuil. Up first, the weaselface wallace test. Search for that at Google, and you get, well, this site first, and then links to other sites where people apparently posted Booblehead threads to other blogs and whatnot (rather flattering, actually). Search at Cuil, and you get, well, it says 32 hits, but it only provides one, which appaears to be a rip-off of the 6/18/07 booblehead thread, but when you click the link, it’s to a domain that’s not longer active. Not terribly impressive.

Next, I tried a search for ‘cokie “the hag” roberts’ on both sites. Google returned about 350 hits (we came in numbers 2 and 3). Cuil?

No results were found for: cokie “the hag” roberts

OK. So maybe Cuil doesn’t do subtle. I figured I’d try something obvious: morning seditionists.

Google returned 9,270 results, with us (as you’d expect) at the top of the list. Cuil found 2,125 results, with lots of sites linking to ours, but, alas, didn’t actually return the site itself.

So, while I certainly think that competition is a good thing, I am quite sad to report that Cuil is not all that cool. In fact “cuil” returned over 2.5 million results at Google and less than 125,00 results from Cuil, while “google” gets 517 million results returned at Cuil, and over 2.7 billion (with a “b”) at Google.

For now, Cuil fails to get our seal of approval, and Google remains the Morning Seditionists’ official unofficial search engine.

Enjoy your Saturday.