Cuil: Rival Search Engine From Ex-Googlers

Wednesday July 30, 2008

Cuil, pronounced "cool", is a search engine that made its debut last Monday to much hype.

The early assessment from around the Web is that Cuil is nowhere near as useful as Google, so maybe it wasn't worth all that hype. A lot of tech bloggers were quite disappointed. But still, checking out these new search engines is interesting because it gives us a glimpse of what might be in store for us in the future.

My initial impression: Cuil still has a long way to go

One thing you immediately notice about Cuil is a the sleek black background. Very anti-Google.

Once you've type in some words, and submit your search query, the first you'll notice are the 3 columns of the search results page. Also most search results have pictures.

The search results were underwhelming for me. Google provided better, more relevant results. And interestingly, some of the pictures didn't match up to the search result. (See below - the image of the globe next to the search result for this guide site is nowhere on the site! Where did they get that?)

I also didn't like the columned layout. Google's single column is easier to scan for the website I'm looking for.

An interesting feature of Cuil are the extra navigation tools. There might be additional tabs up top, or a box with potential categories to the right. (see screenshot below) The idea is good, but they need to return more relevant and useful search results first.

There are a few interesting story lines and trivia:

Cuil is the brainchild of Anna Patterson, an ex-Google search engineer. Along with husband Tom Costello and another ex-Googler Russel Powers.
The project's pedigree generated enough interest to warrant $33 million in funding.
Cuil claims to have an index of 120 billion webpages. They say it's 3 time as large as Google. (Three days before Cuil launched, Google posted a blog entry saying they know about 1 trillion webpages, but only indexes an undisclosed number of useful ones.)
Cuil means "wisdom" in Gaelic.

The hype was unrealistic

I don't think anyone really expected Cuil to crush Google (and Yahoo and MSN) its first day out. And by some expert accounts, maybe not ever.

When asked if she think Cuil can overtake Yahoo or Microsoft in the search space (nevermind Google), VP of Engineering Anna Patterson said, "If we do that in the next year and a half, I'll be an extremely happy person."

"But is even that realistic?", asks Danny Sullivan of Search Engine Land:

Microsoft and Yahoo themselves both have mature search products. What's especially important is that the big three also offer more than the web search that Cuil is providing at launch. News search, image search, video search, local search -- these are just some of the verticals that Cuil lacks but which do get used by searchers. Not offering these makes Cuil feel too focused on what "old school" search used to be and missing out on the Search 3.0 vertical and blended search revolution that has been going on.

Whatever happens to Cuil -- or other upstart search engines like Mahalo and Powerset -- it's exciting to see more competition in the search space. That will push companies to keep innovating, which makes us (the search users) the ultimate winners.

But for the foreseeable future, Google is still the best place to go to find relevant and useful Web content.