Not As Cuil As They Thought
The new Google search killer Cuil launched today to much hype, PR and over loaded servers that you couldn’t access for part of the day. Cuil was started by former Google employees, is pronounced cool and their current claim to fame is that they have indexed 121,617,892,992 web pages. They also do not store any of your search data unlike Google who retains all of your search data which may then be used to not only allow the government to track you down easier but to also improve their own search results.
Cuils search philosophy begins with bigger is better meaning that they believe having the greatest amount of indexed pages is best and that the popularity of a page isn’t the most important when ranking a page for relevancy and that the content on the keywords on a page go a long way in determining how relevant a page is to a search result.
Cuil presents its search results in a much different fashion than Google, Yahoo or MSN. Instead of showing results in a linear fashion with the top result being the most relevant to your search they instead show your results in either a 2 of 3 column depending on what you choose and include an image and text from the site. On the right hand side there is also an ajaxified Explore By Category search refiner that allows you to drill down deeper into your search results. Tabs along the top are used for offering other choices and suggestions to help further define your search terms. They also offer a search term suggestion so as you type in the search fields an auto-complete tries to guess what exactly it is your are going to type. Sadly it appears dirty words do not auto-complete.
Although the search results do look nice with their images and non-standard looking search results I’m not a fan. For starters what is the most relevant search result as compared to my search? I assume it’s the result in the top left position, now what about the second most relevant result according to Cuil? Is it immediately under the top left result or to the right of it? Or are all of the results on the first page equally relevant to my search terms? With Google, Yahoo and MSN you know upon first glance exactly what is deemed to be the most relevant, where as with Cuil I am left guessing.
The layout and look of Cuil is very web 2.0ish and pretty but in the world of search all that matters is result relevancy and currently Cuil appears to be far behind Google in this regard. When searching for the term “oilers” on google.ca, google.com and on cuil.com Both google.ca and google.com brought up the Edmonton Oilers website but cuil.com brought up a freeservers.com site entitled Cosmic Oilers that contains 2 instances of the word oilers (title and text) on the entire page. The Edmonton Oilers website comes up either as the 9th or 7th search result depending on how you count while the Oilers forums are either 4th or 9th. Currently cuil.com isn’t even indexing itself while a quick search on Google returns not only news related to Cuil but the cuil.com website as well.
Granted I only checked the search term oilers and other search terms may yield better results and with time I’m sure that the Cuil algorithm will change to return more relevant results but as it is now Google is still the superior search engine.
Currently in its present state Cuil is much like the knockout blonde with the big set of tits that walks into the room, very pretty to look at but you just have a feeling she is going to be dumber than shit to talk to.