Cuil is a new search engine with big ambitions. Their privacy policy is great; their search results okay. My problem with them is that they interleave web and image results in a way that creates the misleading impression that particular images go with particular web pages. Sometimes, they’re embarrassingly mismatched. My egosurf page, for example, is embarrassing for me. My personal homepage is illustrated with a decade-old monstrosity, whereas my school page is paired up with a Tony Hadley album cover. The worst part is that both of these pages have current photos of me on them.
Cuiling myself returns the same Vim changelog, over and over, mirrored in a couple dozen sites. But there are worse alternatives: a friend’s egosurfing results return hardcore pornography. So, uh, yeah.
My personal search returns (as images) lots of beer labels. On the plus side, it (correctly) pulls out ‘GNOME’ and ‘open source software’ as relevant categories of information you might also want to search within, which is interesting. (And of course it does the right thing by not returning me in the first page of results for Luis. It is flattering that google does this, but surely unhelpful for anyone except my mother.)