Cuil - The Next Big Thing or The Next Big Bust

28 Jul 2008

Cuil – The Next Big Thing or Next Big Bust?

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Cuil.Com Search Engine

If you haven’t heard the hype about the next “greatest” search engine yet, I’ll give you a brief rundown of how Cuil.com came about. According to DigitalTrends, Cuil was founded by ex-Google employees and was designed by the same designers that had a large hand in creating the famous Google algorithm.

Cuil seeks to overthrow Google from the top search engine throne, but sceptics are already finding flaws in the software. That still won’t be enough to stop the hype machine and I’ve already seen numerous blogs, posts, and articles trying to pump the new usurper up.

Cuil launched this month and does boast a web index of over 121 billion pages, which is 3 times that of Google’s current index. From my own experience, although Cuil does have an interesting layout that could revolutionize search results, the results themselves don’t seem to be as accurate as I am used to and the pictures they display aren’t always related to the site itself.

For instance, my own site, nathanhangen.com comes up on page 1 in Google’s database (imagine that), but doesn’t even rank on the first several pages on Cuil. Maybe I’m just not used to the keywords or the way they index pages, but for now I will be sticking with Google.

Technorati Tags: search engine, google, web

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http://twitter.com/nhangen/status/871020989 Nathan Hangen

Currently Browsing: http://tinyurl.com/5rc5af My take on Cuil
http://www.gauravtaneja.com Gaurav Taneja

I didn’t find anything great about the search engine. I do understand that it went down because of the heavy traffic after the launch but even after it came back and i tried comparing the search results there was nothing to be excited about.

It’s like someone launched a basic search engine like when yahoo came out for the first time.

What’s the hype about? i am so confused.
http://NathanHangen.com nathan

Well part of the hype is because it was created by former Google developers, but mostly it is because of the indexing capabilities of the engine itself. Although, like you I was not impressed. We’ll see what happens.
Xottawan

Couldn’t agree more. I read about Cuil this a.m. and decided to do a search of my surname (original!). What emerged was a morass of inaccurate listings, college library references that were not searchable, and garbled listings that had nothing to do with the original search. Sorry, Cuil.
http://www.karlonia.com/2008/08/01/100-quotes-about-power/ Karlonia – Power Quotes

Apparently Cuil was not quite ready for launch during the first day or two – many medium long tail queries did not return results at all, and even general queries returned way fewer results than they should have considering Cuil’s claims of having indexed so many pages already. They did improve somewhat afterward, however, and seem to be picking up more results and increasing relevance as more people have been testing out the engine.

In the long run, I hope they get things together and perform well enough to compete with the major search engines and then maybe do some advertising. I would like to see more serious competitors to Google in order to hold their power in check and encourage more transparency overall.