New Engines on the Search Block

Over the past few months, two new search engines have been creeping their way into the limelight;  Cuil and Wikia Search.

Quil (pron: Cool) was started by ex-Google engineers who now claim they have an index larger than that of Google’s.  While Wikia Search (brainchild of Wiki founder Jimmy Wales) harnesses the power of the masses to build the largest human edited search engine)

I used both engines over the past few weeks and while both offer new features, I don’t think Google will lose sleep over either of them, here’s why…

Cuil:  The results are presented in blocks of text including a picture scrapped from the site they’re displaying.  The results page is too confusing as it provides too much information and looks more like a spammy affiliates page than a search engine results page.

Wikia Search: Better results display but the results themselves need much improvement.  More importantly, since users can edit and review results, the database is very much open to spamming.

Having said the above, its still good to see others trying to improve on what  Google currently offers in terms of search.