Earlier today, I out-sourced to Danny Sullivan a review of the new search engine, Cuil.com. In a comment on that post, Bob Sacks (BoSacks) observed that he uses an ego search to decide if a search engine is any good. That makes sense to me. If I want to find out about someone, chances are the first thing I do is Google them. So I did as Bob suggested and ego-googled “Rex Hammock” — and this is what I got on the first search engine results page (SERP):

1. My Blog (RexBlog.com)
2. My Personal Tumble Log (RexHammock.com)
3. My Flickr account (Flickr.com/rexblog)
4. A photo of me at a BBQ restaurant taken by Dave Winer
5. My Company (Hammock.com)
6 My FriendFeed account (friendfeed.com/rexhammock)
7. My MyBlogLog Profile Page
8. My Twitter Page (twitter.com/r)

Pretty good job, Google, except perhaps, I’d kick that Dave photo to page 2 or 3. From that SERP, you can one-click to about anything you’d ever want to know about me — and way more.

Compare that to the results you’ll get on Cuil.com:

My Jaiku account — that I forgot I had
Several links to Techmeme posts that are two years old
A 2004 interview Steve Ruble posted on his old blog
Some posts on Dave Winer’s & Nick Bradbury’s blogs
Some other even more random links

Bottomline: Cuil is not going to be a go-to source for people who want to find information about other people — or themselves.

Bonus link: Rafe Neddleman writes how Cuil shows how not to launch a search engine. I couldn’t agree more.

Later: I just saw that Chris Brogan did the same thing with his name and discovered the same results. Says Chris, “Call me egotistical, but if you can’t find yourself in a search engine after a decade of littering the web with your presence, I’m thinking it’s not much of a search engine.” Okay, you’re egotistical. And you’re right.

Bonus video: Ouch! The WSJ’s Digital Daily puts Cuil through the meat-grinder. Title of video: How do you spell Cuil? F-A-I-L.

This will be my last comment about Cuil. I think the response is looking like “piling on.”

During the past week, I have become a fan of the AMC series Mad Men. It’s well written, directed and acted and captures the zeitgeist (granted in a caricature way) of an era that I find fascinating. (For anyone watching the program, I would have been about the age of the Draper’s daughter at the time during which the show is set).

I won’t write here in detail about the show for fear of including spoilers — there are too many things about the series I enjoyed because I went into it cold — I only knew it was about advertising in the late 1950s / early 60s. Placing the show in that period and using the names of real products allow for exploration of cultural trends during a period of radical change. The writers and director magnify the cultural differences with our own time to make them even more jarring: the sexism, the ubiquitous smoking, the continuous drinking, the clash of generational mores and old and new media — print and radio, the old, and TV, the new. The writing is so clever, one must have a range of awareness that goes from Cheever to Kerouac to commercial jingles to truly appreciate how great it is. But with no such awareness (although he has read Kerouac), my 17-year-old enjoys the show and watched the season with his highschool friends. (Another post for another venue: Why do teenage boys identify with the 1960-era men on Mad Men?)

My wife and I watched the first season (12 shows) during the past week (an easy iTunes purchase via my Apple TV), but last night we watched the first episode of the current season on the cable channel AMC. Unlike other premium channels, AMC has commercials, so I recorded the show and was ready to fast forward through them.

However, the advertising on the show was nearly as brilliant as the show, itself. Some “pre-roll” and “post-roll” ads from a single sponsor, BMW sandwiched the program. And at the middle of the program, one commercial appeared — a one-minute “documentary” — that looked at 1960s era BMW advertising accompanyed by a voice-over interview of the creative director who developed the “Ultimate Driving Machine” tag line.

At the end of the program, the BMW advertising was focused on current and future developments by BMW, including a hydrogen car, but still had a texture that tied it back to the past.

It was brilliant advertising that kept me from fast-forwarding through it. It was the type of TV advertising that works in any era.

[Later: I posted this early Monday morning. Now, it's mid-afternoon. After using Cuil a little, I've decided they should shut it down and give any money left over back to the investors. All it has done for me is make me realize how wonderful Google is.]

When I see a new online service announced, say, Cuil, a new search “challenger” to Google, I typically go to the site and click around. Seeing what it is, I seek the insight of someone I know follows closely the developments in that category. For instance with anything related to search, I look for what Danny Sullivan has written. Sure enough, sometime in the middle of the night, Danny has posted his quick review of the Google killer.

Because Danny is a professional guru of how search works, he has a battery of tests he can immediately run a new search tool through. From reading Danny’s, I have learned that having benchmarks can help someone compare any “new” thing with some valid comparisons, rather than some knee-jerk opinion.

Read Danny’s review for a real review. As for my personal review of Cuil, I’ll say this: I have five words and phrases in my benchmark tests that I know get the results I have learned will appear on page one of Google’s SERP (search engine results page). These five searches involve words and phrases related to my work, so I track them very closely. The results I expect to see don’t show up on Cuil — they look more like Microsoft’s results. I know the information found on the sites I expect to see will be more helpful to someone searching for information about the topic. So, at least for this morning and for me personally, Cuil is not doing well against my benchmarks.

• This is the 2,000th bookmark I’ve added to del.icio.us/rexblog
  I started using the service on December 31, 2004.Additionally I (and some others) bookmark on the account del.icio.us/smallbusiness, which now has 4,147 items bookmarked.
  (tags: delicious)