I was anxious to try out this new Cuil search engine everyone’s buzzing about. The management team is loaded with former Google-ites, and they’ve promised to deliver "the world’s biggest search engine," meaning all those sites Google ignores will now be included in Cuil search results. Further, content and relevance are king, which should provide a much more satisfying search experience.
To be honest, I don’t have any beefs with Google. I use it throughout the day and I generally find what I’m looking for in the top half of the first page of results. Then again, I was happy with Lycos many years ago before shifting to Yahoo. Then I abandoned Yahoo to jump on the Google bandwagon. Although I’ve pretty much stuck with Google for the past several years you can see I have no search engine loyalty. I’ll use whatever suits my needs.
Need a new search engine? Depends
By the way, I’ve seen lots of people ask the question, "do we need another search engine?" My answer is, "it depends", but I’m not convinced the solution involves focus groups or building a business/tool around user feedback. That’s how New Coke’s are born. After all, was anyone really screaming for a better search engine in 1997-1998 when Google hit the scene? I’m pretty sure we were all happy with Yahoo, AltaVista, Excite and the others back then. It reminds me of that great quote from Henry Ford who said, "If I had asked my customers what they wanted, they would have said a faster horse."
Well, Cuil may indeed be a faster (or at least bigger) horse than Google, but I’m not all that impressed with it. The searches I experimented with produced results that were different from Google’s but I still found Google’s to be more useful and relevant. Although it doesn’t take much to change search engines I’d need a compelling reason to switch from Google; I’m not finding that with Cuil.
P.S. — Searchme is probably the only search engine I’ve seen recently that’s worthy of abandoning Google over. No, it’s not just the nifty user interface…I like the whole stacks metaphor they use and how stacks can be saved and sent to others. Now that’s something I never would have suggested as a search engine improvement but it really lends itself to some very interesting applications.
Ive found that google are starting to fail me a bit, in that it dont find primary sources for anything only blogs and other syndication feeds that belong inside the sphere of social media(who tends to get cross linket a lot).
The hidden www of huge dusty archives and databases is simply getting even more hidden as google’s popularity ranking takes over for relevance ranking, half the links on a typical google page dont even contain the search terms those days.
I was not impressed by my Cuil test drive. I did an “ego search” (a search for my own name) that returned over 15,000 hits. I chased a dozen or so on which I was surprised to find my name and the vast majority were bogons — mostly 404 errors and domain squatters. Cuil’s index may be larger than than Google, but it certainly appears to be seriously out of date. Back to the drawing board, boys….
Creating a competitive web search engine is an arduous and perilous task so I hesitate to criticize the underdogs at Cuil. Indeed I wish them Godspeed. Yet the press release brags that it “has indexed 120 billion Web pages, three times more than any other search engine.” So I will mention my first mixed experience. The number of search results generated was pleasantly large.
Unfortunately, Cuil is not effectively screening out splogs from its results. A splog is the abbreviated term for a spam blog which is an artificially synthesized website that typically uses text harvested via blog scraping to manipulate the rank ordering of search results.
Perhaps Cuil should paradoxically be working hard to index fewer than “120 billion Web pages.”
I was also curious and tried CUIL out. It was a disappointment for me. I did a simple search on “olympic beijing taipei” with Google and got 1,260,000 hits, while with Cuil only received 19 hits. It almost seems like it only searches its cache and not directly against its 120 billions of indices it boasts to have. Also, if you compare it with Google, you will notice that you do not have the option to formulate your search to a specific target using Boolean operators or searching webpage using specific timeline (i.e. in the last 24 hour).