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Having heard a lot a buzz about the Cuil search engine, I decided to give it a side-by-side trial with Google, using separate tabs in Firefox. After only a few minutes of searching for information and photos on lakes in the California Sierra Nevada (hardly an exotic topic), I closed the Cuil tab vowing never to return, as the Cuil search engine seemed more like a prank or a tool directed at the cognitively impaired than a serious effort at improving web searching.

Not only did Cuil fail miserably at retrieving the desired information and pictures, the links and associated thumbnail photos usually had nothing to do with one another. In one instance, clicking on a photo taken at a lake near Yosemite took me to a website located in Florida! Using Google's sophisticated search syntax, however, yielded up dozens of *relevant* results within seconds. "Cuil" may indeed rhyme with "cool", but it also rhymes with "fool", which is what a person would have to be to rely on the Cuil engine for serious searching.

There is a reason for Google's search hegemony: it works. Cuil doesn't and it is just that simple.