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Cuil Is Not So Cool
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:
So many new search engines fail principally because they try to take on Google, by doing search in the same way. Stupid.
Cuil is interesting, its been built from the ground up with a totally different take on search and has been crawling in secret since at least Nov 2007. At the moment, like you say, the results are poor, but if it really does index EVERYTHING, one day Cuil might become quite good.
Cuil has a fairer way of searching; maybe the thing I wanna know is buried somewhere deep online where nobody goes and nobody links to it.
I conducted my own little investigation (http://www.leytonjay.co.uk/internet-stuff/new-search-engine-cuil) that just led my search pattern into an endless circle.
Until Cuil’s relevancy issues are sorted out and the crawling is more frequent and more thorough, I’m not gonna use it for anything.
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