Is it wrong and narcissistic that I always judge a new search engine by how it makes me look? Does this make my keywords look fat?

[Found this by typing in the string “organic, novelty, engine” (no quotes) into Google trends as a response to new_consumer’s death of SEO post.]

As a long-time web-o-naut and all-around smart internet-type guy, I have to say that Cuil’s egosurfing results are WAY BETTER, MORE RECENT AND MORE ACCURATE than Google’s which is still pulling data from some source off my timboucher.com domain (Alexa, is my guess) saying that I live in NYC.

GET A GRIP GOOGLE! That was five years ago!

On top of that, Cuil is moving towards the format that I’ve been discussing on this site for months: the digest. It’s more like an intel report, and minimizes the need for you to actually click through onto websites in order to gain the info you’re looking for. More like an executive summary and Google’s still striving to feed results to middle managers who try to micromanage everybody else’s business.

Cuil is, not surprisingly though, a spin-off from Google. And it has that “wow” factor that’s so hot right now in marketing, where they do the semantic hijacking technique, of chaining new associations onto phonemes, so that “cuil” an exotic new word becomes “cool”, a common ordinary word, like “Wii” becomes “we” etc. Add that to the fact they have better results than Google (for this one singular narcissistic search result, albeit) and have a multi-column approach, and I think we’re going to see a hot contender in today’s recognition market.

Egosurfing, I think, is not a trivial way to for a tech-savvy youth market to “test” a new search engine though. Because for someone like me, I’ve been on the web enough to know more or less what’s out there about me and what it says. And then I also know how I want myself and my image and my work to be portrayed. And so that means I can do a quick read on how well a given internet search algorithm metaphor allows me to “express myself as a consumer” and all that other good jazz they love.