RSSEx-Googler creates 'Cuil' search engine, but results fall short of rivals
By Tim Conneally | Published July 28, 2008, 2:30 PM
New search engine Cuil has opened to the public, and with it, the requisite comparisons and challenges to Google, former employer of Cuil's engineering team. But the site is experiencing much downtime in its first day.
Built with $33 million in venture capital from Greylock Partners, Madrone Capital Partners, and Tugboat Ventures, Cuil is made up of an all-star team of Web technology veterans. The husband and wife founders are Tom Costello, creator of Xift, and Anna Patterson, creator of Recall, a technology now used by Google. Rounding out the team are ex-Google engineers Russell Power and Louis Monier, also the ex-CTO of AltaVista.
Cuil's claim to fame is that its search index contains over 120 billion sites, which it says is more than Google. The search engine features a homepage that shares Google's minimalist design ethic. Query results are returned in a columned and tabbed window not unlike the "GluePage" Yahoo tested earlier this year in India.
Recent remarks made by Patterson to the media that challenge Google are a definite misstep for the parvenu engine. She has been quoted as saying she believed Cuil's index was at least three times the size of Google's, a number which would otherwise have been difficult to substantiate, as Google does not regularly advertise the size of its index.
However, responding to inquiries about this statement, Google came out in its blog Friday, saying it regularly scans through over a trillion unique Web links, but doesn't index duplicates or inferior results.
A further challenge to Google, the Cuil team also touts superior user privacy, as the site does not use cookies or record user IP addresses. Google has faced considerable criticism from privacy advocates for its data retention policies.
Undoubtedly the most important aspect of a search engine is user experience and the quality of query results it yields. In BetaNews tests this afternoon (access to the site has been sporadic, with frequent "unavailable" messages), Cuil came up short in boh areas.
Searches for the term "torino" yielded no results, but "Torino" (with a capital T) gave a considerable list of hits. The term "Commodore 64," one of the most popular computers of the 8-bit age turned up zero results, regardless of case. The same happened in a search for "Windsor."
A side-by-side comparison with Google and the search terms "barrage of noise" is shown below, Cuil returned no information, and Google returned over 90 thousand pages of links.
While Cuil is sill brand new and a promising new entry into the search engine category, a public relations attack on Google risks making the company look amateurish. If industry leaders like Microsoft and Yahoo still fall behind Google in search share, a startup needs to really offer something special before it can hope to challenge Google.
Another potential issue facing the newcomer is the name it chose. The arcane name "Cuil" is a play on Gaelic hero Fionn mac Cumhaill, better known as "Finn MacCool," meaning the service is pronounced "Cool." However, a simple re-arrangement of Cuil points to an adult-themed site, as the typo is slang in some romance languages for a particular body part.
Just some thoughts on Cuil so far:
1. Terrible name. Please change it ASAP.
2. Search screen: solid black background is a bad idea. (And you guys are web developers?)
3. Search results page: looks too much like results from a shopping meta-search engine. Hard to take it seriously like that.
4. I don't see how this is in ANY way an improvement over Google, or any other search engine out there for that matter, yet. In some ways, it is even a few steps back it would appear.
Something tells me these guys are going to regret quitting their jobs at Goolge here very soon unless they can dramatically improve this and make it a big step up over what is already out there. This first attempt misses the mark, big time, I'm afraid. I wouldn't be out buying any new Tesla roadsters on credit any time soon if I were these guys. Might want to seriously rethink the business plan on this before spending too much more money on it. They won't be impressing anyone on Sand Hill Road with this effort (except maybe the people that sweep it at night).
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|Why do we need an alternative to google? I have never had any problems finding what I wanted. There tools are all innovative and useful, and if one company had to have a monopoly on an industry I would rather have it be one with a "don't be evil" attitude like googles. Also if you are so concerned about privacy use http://www.googlonymous.com/
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|Just search for: cuil search engine
, be suprised.. it has THREE results. I don't believe they ever will be serious competition. Period.
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|I'm liking Cuil, after hitting a few snags throughout the day, it's working fine now.
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|on a positive note, searching for "barrage of noise" now returns tons of results :)
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|Whats with the hard to read web page style.
Its certainly trying to be different and look cooler. But when its 10x harder to read, thats
not a step up, its a step down.
I'll stick to google. thanks.
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|I remember when Google first started, I saw basically the same comments about it that I'm seeing for Cuil. Give it some time and see what happens.
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|So many forget one thing.
This is a NEW search engine.
Come back in 6 months and see where it is at.
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|Its in beta, got to be... its slow, results not relevant etc.. needs more work
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|I tried it out too and think that not only does 'Cuil' have an awful name, but that it did not produce results that were as useful as Google.
I read the story this morning on CNN.com before it hit here -- and I appreciate BN's analysis. I agree about the attack on Google making them look amateur(ish?!)
A9.com should have succeeded in the marketplace, and I am pretty confident at this point that if Amazon.com cannot get into the search market, that a standalone named cuil.com is going to have an ever tougher time.
IMHO, the only way to properly revolutionize the search industry is to combine the strengths of existing search engine concepts with the social media aspects seen on video sharing sites and the user moderation seen on Wikipedia.com.
With so much junk on the Internet, things like 'Google Local' (and the MSN/Y! derivatives) make so much sense as they force companies that want to be listed to be able to accept a telephone or mail confirmation before proceeding with being listed.
Having a smarter algorithm and a different layout is not going to impress anyone. It's likely that someone can recreate cuil.com's look and feel using Google's APIs.
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|Unfortunately the results remind me of that other stinker Ya freakin' hoo.
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|they need to work on the engine, tis slow to display results. Python would be ideal here
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|Competition for Google, about time:) hope these guys make it and knock Google off the top
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|Try their search engine before you look silly =)
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|Did some searching and was OK. Can't tell if it lives up to Google yet, which is unlikely but competition is always good if an organization is in such a dominant position such as Google.
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|I don't like it at all...i did a search for products my company sells and there weren't very many sites listed that have anything to do with the product...like the olden days of search engines!! I'm sticking with Google.
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|Cuil returned thus for Commodor 64 at 15:19 EDST:
2,404,245 results for Commodore 64
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|At the moment, I just get this:
Sorry, an error occurred.
Please try your search again. If the problem persists, please be assured that our team is working quickly to resolve the issue.
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|Cuil is virtually useless in its present state (or earlier today, anyway---the site is down due to "hot" servers). A search for "cheap laptops" yielded no results. A search for "laptops" fared better, but guess what was in the search results? Sites advertising, verbatim "cheap laptops."
Don't much care for the way results are laid out, either.
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|I got 2,760,999 hits for "cheap laptops" =)
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|I'm just getting redirected to http://www.cuil.com/info/unavailable.html
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