Cuil is cool, but will it out-search Google?
A bunch of former Google employees have unleashed Cuil (www.cuil.com), a new search site meant to take on the group’s former employer. And while Google dominance is secure for now, Cuil offers one feature that some surfers will like. Douglas…
A bunch of former Google employees have unleashed Cuil (www.cuil.com), a new search site meant to take on the group’s former employer. And while Google dominance is secure for now, Cuil offers one feature that some surfers will like.
Douglas Adams’ "The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy" has this to say about space: "Space is big. Really big. You just won’t believe how vastly hugely mindbogglingly big it is. I mean you may think it’s a long way down the road to the chemist, but that’s just peanuts to space."
The same is true of the Web, and with new pages added every day it is only getting more mindbogglingly big. That means everyone uses search engines, and that means there’s a lot of money to be made from them.
Enter Cuil. The site’s creators claim it indexes three times more pages than does Google, although other sources say it is not even at par yet, but for most searches it’s a meaningless difference. A Cuil search for "Star Trek" pulls up 38,387,589 results, while Google came back with "about 47,600,000," but even real fans will rarely read beyond the first 25. Where total numbers do make a difference is for obscure topics: if there are only five pages on Malaysia’s tescinia beetle, a more thorough index has a better chance of catching those pages.
But again, for most searches the absolute numbers are less relevant. Where Cuil does stand out is the way it organizes its hits. Each result comes with a snippet of the page, making it easy to scan the results before selecting one, and the site also suggests topic subsets (such as Star Trek Voyager. Star Trek Enterprise, etc.) and breaks the results down into categories.
Some surfers will like this extra assistance, others will have a more "get on with the results" attitude. But Cuil is certainly worth checking out. However, one cautionary note: the site just launched and interest has been so high that its servers are suffering occasional overloads. So you might see "Due to overwhelming interest, our Cuil servers are running a bit hot right now. The search engine is momentarily unavailable as we add more capacity." If so, take the time to try again later. You may stop using Google as a verb and instead employ "Cuil."
Peter Wolchak
Backbone magazine
Filed Under: Web/Tech
will it out search google? i think not but change is good and it may force them to think differently and add new features
not so long ago people asked whether ask.com would out perform google and it clearly has not but google has tweaked their engine to adapt to the requests made by the other search engines
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I agree completely Rem. And actually, this story has gotten more interesting in the 24 hours since my blog post. Cuil did not have a good launch — the site was down, or slow or inaccurate for much of the day — and it has been savaged by many reviewers.
However it does have some interesting features, and while I wouldn't rush to invest in the company it does seem that either Cuil will be successful or that it will prompt Google to add some interesting features. Probably the latter, but who knows?
Peter
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not yet… google takes you places, the question is, can CUIL take you places Google can not… this remains to be seen but at first glimpse.. there is work to do
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WOW just what the world needs is another search engine. It almost like someone saying This just in: Another Gaint Marketing Firm has your email address, please get ready for a whole lot of junk mail over the next 6 months.
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Personally, I welcome a change. I find that google seems to be inserting more and more links to places where I can buy things related to my searches rather than find actual information. Google has become nothing more than a mass marketing whore, and I welcome a new search engine if it can do a decent search.
I didn't mind the old google ads along the sides, but now when I do a google search, the first 25 or so results are all from amazon.com, and various other vendors, and it's getting worse. I want a search engine, not a 'where can I buy stuff' search.
Face it, google is starting to suck, big time.
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Cuil has a long way to go – may of the results i found were from pages that hadn't been re-indexed in months. I also found the format frustrating, with no real advantage over Google or MSN's layout.
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I have to agree with both Tony and Simon. I may not be quite as critical of Google, but I do think change and a shake-up is a good idea. Dominance by one player in any space is a bad thing.
But I am also with Simon: Cuil doesn't really seem ready to play with the big kids. It feels like it was launched a month early, and would have benefited from both more indexing time and a few extra servers to handle the load on launch day.
Of course, there is a very interesting theory floating around that Cuil was never really intended to be a full-fledged, standalone search engine, but rather that the creators are simply putting out a proof of concept in the hope that someone (Microsoft likely) will like the technology enough to buy it.
Peter
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Google is okay if you want to know every possible place to buy every possible item. So it's great for shopping.But this purpose should be a distant second to its primary purpose of searching out actual information on a topic. That was the original purpose it served and its capabilities in performing that pupose were mind-boggling. As a huge list of vendors it is not mind-boggling any more than the yellow pages of the telephone directory are mind- boggling.It has become a disappointingly mundane peddler. Let's hope tht Cuil can build itself up to the stature of the original google whose purpose was purer and more worthy.
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