For those of you that haven’t already heard, there a new player on the search scene. Cuil (pronounced “cool”) is taking on the Big 3 (Google, Yahoo and Microsoft) and claims a larger search index (120 billion web pages) than any of them.

Comparisons with Google are inevitable, especially given the founders are ex-Googlers, and the general reaction so far is that Cuil fails to live up to expectations, primarily with regard to result relevance. Indeed, my first impressions were certainly not that great…

Having recently released a website for my Air Cadet squadron I thought I’d see how easy it is to find using Cuil. The query was “1343 squadron”; the results were, pretty useless, seeming to be a random collection of results for either the number 1343 or the word squadron. There was no apparent linking of the two. Appending “atc” to the query to narrow the search, results in absolutely nothing found, whereas the top four Google results for both queries are directly relevant to the search.

The biggest problem for Cuil at the moment is the risk of people trying it out, only to discover it doesn’t help them find what they’re looking for and simply returning to Google. The tech-savvy crowd will no doubt stick around to see how things progress, but I doubt the majority of web users will be so forgiving of search results that are lacking in relevance.

Further reading:

• Google Beats Cuil Hands Down In Size And Relevance, But That Isn’t The Whole Story
• Cuil And Counting Crows
• Ask YC: On Cuil
• New Search Engine! Cuil
• Cuil Features

The other week I was discussing the issues I have with my knees when running and it was suggested I buy a knee support. So being the web-literate and lazy person that I am, I did a quick Google search in order to find a purveyor of said items. Every site I went to required me to create an account before being able to make a purchase.

Which brings me on nicely to the Number 1 Error Made By Online Retailers…
Why, oh why, oh why, do I need to sign up, create an account or join your community in order to purchase something from you?

All I want is a knee support, a bunch of flowers, a simple birthday gift; I’m not looking for a long term relationship at this point. If you do well this time and manage to deliver what I ordered, on time and for a reasonably price I may very well come back, but I don’t know you well enough yet. I don’t want to worry about how you store my password, address and credit card details, or whether you’re going to send me spam.

The number one thing that will make me leave your website and probably never come back is requiring me to open an account in order to complete a simple and potentially one-off purchase. I don’t have to do it when I shop in the high street, so why do you feel it’s ok on the Web?

A couple of years ago I used to spend a lot of time and money at Overclockers.co.uk. Their prices weren’t the lowest but the website was simple and uncluttered, and more importantly I didn’t need to create an account. Just find what I want to buy, go to the checkout, fill in the absolute minimum details for completing a credit card transaction over the internet and that’s it. Then they redesigned their site and included the apparently obligatory “My Account” functionality. Unfortunately the redesigned site was almost identical to Dabs and eBuyer and had totally lost its simple and original look and feel. Seeing as I already had accounts with eBuyer and Dabs and didn’t want another one, I stopped shopping there.

If you’re a web developer creating online retail sites, think twice before requiring an account before allowing a user to make a purchase, you could be causing your client to lose sales…