Cuil, the Google killer?

Posted on August 9, 2008 at 5:19 am

Following a discussion on the size of Google’s web index, Michael Arrington cryptically concluded by saying:

Google also says “But we’re proud to have the most comprehensive index of any search engine.”

That may be true today, but it probably won’t be true next week (check back here then). Google knows that as well as we do, and that’s why they posted this today.

Or in other words, TechCrunch has an exclusive.

Sure enough, on the 28th of July, TechCrunch posted the news of a brand new search engine called Cuil which would be launching later that day.

Cuil promotes itself as having the largest search index of any search engine, 120 billion pages. Apparently by contrast Google has an estimated index of around 40 billion pages.

Does Cuil have what it takes? Can it provide some healthy competition to Google, market dominator?

Here is a screenshot of the Cuil homepage:

As you can see, Cuil has gone in for a sleek black interface, perhaps to differentiate itself from Google as much as possible.

The Cuil results page has taken a new approach to the standard top ten list of every other search engine. Instead results are presented across the page in three columns to decrease the importance of that number 1 spot. Its true that in many cases there are multiple websites that are equally relevant so this is a smart approach.

Incidentally Cuil has quite a hideous favicon, even worse then the Google’s new one. Check it out for yourself, although pointing this out made me think of one of Rob Cottingham’s recent cartoons from Noise to Signal:

If you thought Google was the king of spartan home pages, Cuil one-ups it. 28 is the magic number for Google, Cuil beats it be a whole 16 words.

We could talk about the interface, the background, the reasons it will or won’t work forever, however Danny Sullivan from Search Engine Land brilliantly summed it up with one sentence:

Cuil provides what appears to be a comprehensive index of the web, a unique display presentation and emerges at a time when people might be ready to embrace a quality "underdog" service.

See the fact is, search engine start-ups are a dime a dozen. It seems like every second week I see the next amazing start-up promising semantic, P2P, spam-free indexes, people powered or community powered etc and so on.

The reality is, Google has been good enough for a decade now. It’s not perfect by a long shot but they took the mind and market share and kept it.

Unfortunately number 2 competitor Yahoo! has some stigma from being the old search engine of the 90s and its image has been hurt even more by the recent Microsoft takeover attempt and proxy battle with investor Carl Ichan.

Windows Live Search is also getting close to Google in terms of accuracy and has had vast amounts of resources sunk into the service yet suffers somewhat from being associated with Microsoft and bad marketing (MSN, Live… what?).

So Why is Cuil any different?

Considering the huge combined resources of Yahoo and Microsoft have done little to nothing to stop the rapidly expanding Google how wise is it to expect a little start-up like Cuil to compete with the giant?

Well, Cuil has some pretty impressive profiles behind the service. From the New York Times:

In her two years at Google, Anna Patterson helped design and build some of the pillars of the company’s search engine, including its large index of Web pages and some of the formulas it uses for ranking search results.

Not just Anna, Cuil also includes the founder of AltaVista Louis Monier, Tom Costello who was involved with IBM’s WebFountain project and Russell Power who worked on the TeraGoogle project. Anna’s husband and several additional ex-Google employees are also part of the team.

This is an impressive team of developers and gives substance to their statement of creating the most relevant search engine.

The biggest issue I have seen with Cuil’s announcement concerning their search engine is one which was also pointed out by Danny Sullivan:

Seeing Cuil trot out size figures is incredibly disheartening and a step backwards, not forwards. Time better spent on other things (such as measuring the RELEVANCY of the results) will instead get consumed by those trying to count pages. Without even running queries and trying to perform comparison counts

I really don’t care how big a search engine index is when I know, just as you know, that go beyond page 10 on any web search and you’ll find nothing but spam and Chinese websites. All I care about is how accurate the results on that first page are.

I decided to test out several of the most popular search services to see how they compared to each other and newcomer Cuil.

For this test I have used the phrase “shipping seven”. Shipping Seven refers to the development process of the next version of Microsoft Windows (Windows codename: seven). It’s a good phrase as it’s pretty obscure and will really test how relevant results are between search engines.

Here are the results:

Cuil

10% Relevant

Cuil had the grand total of 1 relevant result, admittedly it was at the first position, however I expected it to do a little better then that.

Google

100% Relevant

All 10 of Google’s first page where directly relevant with result number 1 going to the controversial Shipping Seven blog itself, which in fact it even has a mini feed of the latest 3 items as you can see in the screenshot.

Yahoo!

50% Relevant

A total of 5 links scattered down the page, the Shipping Seven blog makes it to number 1. A decent result, but also indicative of why Yahoo is trailing Google.

Windows Live Search

60% Relevant Results

Live Search does marginally better then Yahoo! and provides 6 relevant links. Note that Live Search has 6 relevant links over the first 7 results, Yahoo! has only 4 relevant links over the first 7.

Ask

0% Relevancy

Ask actually had 4 relevant results on the front page, but I’m giving it a 0% due to the horrendous design.

Here is what greeted me after submitting my search:

That’s right, not a single actual search result in view, you have scroll down for that. Instead I get a full page of advertisements and an annoying sidebar suggesting search terms. The top right side of the page is the ‘hottest’ area, the place we see first… how filling it up with a sidebar only a few people may use is considered smart I cannot understand.

As If space wasn’t constricted enough the Ask search bar is an overlay rather then a header at the top of the page.

Sure, this is just one search term I’ve demonstrated here but I think by looking at these results we can see that Google has little to fear yet. That said, Google has spent a decade and millions of dollars working on their index, Yahoo and Microsoft potentially have as well.

Cuil is just a few days old and has made an impressive start; I look forward to seeing their progress in the search space. What are your thoughts on Cuil after playing around with it for the last few weeks?

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Comments

3 Responses to “Cuil, the Google killer?”

Chris said on : August 11th, 2008 at 11:19 am

I couldn’t agree more with what you are saying about Cuil,

they are definitely going for it, but it’s hard to imagine them doing anything but incremental changes to what Google’s done. And even that would take years of effort.

Me.dium.com has taken a different tack. We have a full web index, but we change the results based on the surfing activity of our user base (now over 2,000,000). It’s in alpha, but I’d be curious to hear your thoughts. http://me.dium.com/search

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[...] way to do searching. Other search engines have tried to get a tiny slice of the search pie like Cuil, which recently got a lot of hype, but failed to live up to exceptations and Spock, a search [...]
September 5th, 2008 at 5:26 am
Bing – A new search engine from Microsoft Says:

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