Google competitor off to rocky start

by Rob Peters | July 29, 2008 at 09:17 am

1238 views | 16 Recommendations | 17 comments

UPDATE July 29, 2008:

The new search engine that launched yesterday, Cuil, didn't fare well on its first day despite considerable hype:

On Day 1 yesterday of its attempt to dethrone Google Inc. as king of the Internet search engines, Cuil was shaping up to be a New Coke-style fiasco.

Vitriol was flying fast on tech maven Chris Brogan's IT blog. After waiting two hours for Cuil to return two results for his name, contributor Gopal Shenoy wrote: "(Cuil) is basically unusable – paint dries faster. Did they test this thing to see what the results are before they got coverage on CNN on how Google needs to be scared of them

Personally, I think people are overreacting. A lot of tech startups get going before they're perfect because, as a smart bike enthusiast once said, you can't really tell what's wrong with a bicycle until you ride it. Having said that, I'm not about to switch from Google anytime soon.

____________

July 28, 2008:

A few plucky ex-Google employees launched a new search engine today, and unlike some of the other Google wannabes out there, there's actually some money behind it ($33 million of venture capital to be precise, which I'm told is a decent chunk of change, even for a Google competitor).

Aside from the awkward name, which is Cuil (pronounced "Cool"), the new engine boasts some nifty features: search results appear in a magazine format rather than a list, it draws from a bigger index pool, and apparently searches look at the contents of a page rather than links and tags.

I did a little test run today and had to search for terms twice to get any results--probably a day one bug I imagine. Overall it seemed OK, but my biggest beef is the name. As one blogger pointed out, how can "Cuil" become a verb? Cooling for stuff on the net just sounds weird. Teachers in class will be forced to say things like, "If you don't stop cooling right now, you're in for detention mister." Do we want that?

There’s a whole lot of buzz online today over the new search engine Cuil.com (pronounced “cool”). There’s two reasons for this. The first, most accessible reason is that Cuil.com claims to index more Web sites (120 million) than Google does. Theoretically, when you search for something on Cuil, you’re drawing from a larger pool of data. The second reason is that the people responsible for Cuil are all ex-Google folk with a lot of venture capital propping them up.

Sticking it to your ex-boss is always the best motivator:

Patterson instead intends to upstage Google, which she quit in 2006 to develop a more comprehensive and efficient way to scour the Internet.

The end result is Cuil, pronounced "cool." Backed by $33 million in venture capital, the search engine plans to begin processing requests for the first time Monday.

(Index) size matters:

Cuil's search index spans 120 billion Web pages.

Patterson believes that's at least three times the size of Google's index, although there is no way to know for certain. Google stopped publicly quantifying its index's breadth nearly three years ago when the catalog spanned 8.2 billion Web pages.

Cuiling looks at content:

Rather than trying to mimic Google's method of ranking the quantity and quality of links to Web sites, Patterson says Cuil's technology drills into the actual content of a page. And Cuil's results will be presented in a more magazine-like format instead of just a vertical stack of Web links. Cuil's results are displayed with more photos spread horizontally across the page and include sidebars that can be clicked on to learn more about topics related to the original search request.

The Privelege of Privacy:

Cuil is hoping to attract traffic by promising not to retain information about its users' search histories or surfing patterns - something that Google does, much to the consternation of privacy watchdogs.

A techie's test drive:

I decided to take Cuil for a spin this morning to see just how well it stacks up to Google.

I went to Cuil.com. It's obvious Cuil wants to be the anti-Google. Where Google's home page is all white, Cuil's is black, with just some simple text and a search box located smack in the center of the page. I am sure this design is no accident. I typed in the search query "Mesa Boogie."

Cuil returned about 200,000 results. Rather than a simple list of links, Cuil gave me three columns of results. Each column had four results in it, making for 12 search results on the first page. These results go beyond links to other Web pages. Each result displayed the name of the Web page, included an image, and had about 50 to 100 words worth of text pulled from that Web page so you know what's on it.

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mchawk

flagged this story as Good Stuff

at 13:46 on July 28th, 2008

Rob Peters, I like this story. It's good stuff.

I've had a go of Cuil and it seems ok, but it's got a hell of a long way to go to gain a foothold in the market. Good luck to it!

I hadn't thought of the language barrier, but Johnny's comment made me laugh. But then I always thought "google" was a dodgy bit of bowling in cricket and "yahoo" was synonymous with "hayseed" - so perhaps there's a trend in these names.

azzayindia

flagged this story as Good Stuff

at 14:32 on July 28th, 2008

Rob Peters, I like this story. It's good stuff.

i did not know about this thanks for posting

solracarevir

flagged this story as Good Stuff

at 14:41 on July 28th, 2008

thanks for using my picture for the story

Lord Inquisitor

at 17:31 on July 28th, 2008

Cuil has a long way to go to get anywhere yet, its to basic and not much use from what ive seen so far.

ksprashu

at 19:05 on July 28th, 2008

When I first read the news about the launch of Cuil(I still tend to pronounce it as Koo-Yill, which is the name of the bird Koel in Malayalam), I opened up the site to see what it was about this new site that claimed to better Google.

Of course, the first selling point would be that it was started by ex-Google employees and that sets a precedence on the usability and features of this new search engine. Of course, I wanted to know more about this and I clicked on the 'About Cuil' button and had the rude shock of a 'Page not found' error. I believe, the first page that should be fully functional on a web site is the 'About' page. It is this that makes the user feel one with the product by getting to know the background and the reason for the product and by getting to know the minds behind the product.

I did try a search and the way it which the search results were arranged was a little different from the way google and almost every other search engine does it. So in case Cuil wants to do things differently, they have to do it intuitively or at least have a help page where they show how to read into the search results.

Overall I was far from impressed, but I would like to come back and see how they are ironing out the kinks in their product.

--
Prashanth
http://blogs.prashu.com

ksprashu has contributed a photo to this story.

Feureau

at 21:34 on July 28th, 2008

At it's current incarnation, Cuil can't even find cuil on the internet. Try cuiling for "cuil".

Feureau has contributed a photo to this story.

Mara.Lisha

at 00:44 on July 29th, 2008

First reaction from Greece on Cuil.com. The new search engine is not so "cool" with Unicode fonts and non-English languages. [Print screen of Cuil.com Search Engine courtesy of... Cuil.com]

Mara.Lisha has contributed a photo to this story.

CaligalUK

at 00:56 on July 29th, 2008

Stumbled across the site in my web travels yesterday and gave it a whirl looking up "dumped", "break-up" and my own name to see how it faired and what it returned.

Surprised that with "break-up" we faired better than with "dumped" and dumped is in the URL while "break up" is only in the title....so this is interesting to me.

Out of 5.5 million "dumped" pages we ended up in the first page and just as good with "break up" really - so "two thumbs" up from Glasgow thus far!

Cuil is pretty Cool. Not sure I'll be ditching my usual search engine - its rival - Google - but I'll certainly continue to give it a whirl and see how we go..

CaligalUK has contributed a photo to this story.

World_Groove

at 09:54 on July 29th, 2008

I Cuiled myself !!

Seriously, I did a search on Cuil for myself and found nothing. Being the hugely import figure I am (Sarcasm) I was shocked it yielded no results, while all other search engines do.

I coined the phrase "Cuiled Myself" I shall be famous the world over, and all shall bow down to my superior whit abilities in Pun. (Sarcasm again)

PlanMyGreen

at 12:34 on July 29th, 2008

I believe this is the only way to submit your website for indexing so far. If anyone knows of another, I would love to know it.

http://www.cuil.com/info/webmaster_info/

infomatique

at 13:18 on July 29th, 2008

I must say that I was totally unimpressed after trying a number of different searches. The returned hits were not relevant.

Amy Judd

at 15:15 on July 29th, 2008

I think we're all just so used to Google that we can't handle anything else. I didn't even know where to look for the results when I tried it!

PlanMyGreen

at 15:39 on July 29th, 2008

Lol, I think you are right. Though I like to think google isn't the best that can be done, it is pretty brazen to say you plan on knocking google out of the water when they have clearly got to where they are after years of testing ideas and processes. The cuil setup looks nice, but clearly is not ready to take on the big dog. I am interested in seeing what cuil.com plans on doing to counter google.com/accounts and all the apps and add-ons. I think they forget that google search is just 1 of many parts of the google machine.

veena (not verified)

at 21:32 on July 29th, 2008

No one can compete with " GOOGLE " Is a king of search engines

But we cant conclude the site which just launch on web..............

lets see what "CUIL " does good for browsers........

BUT GOOGLE is the best.............of all

BEST OF LUCK CUIL

RoryKearney

flagged this story as Good Stuff

at 02:38 on July 30th, 2008

Rob Peters, I like this story. It's good stuff.

"Cuil is hoping to attract traffic by promising not to retain information about its users' search histories or surfing patterns - something that Google does, much to the consternation of privacy watchdogs".

Sign me up.

rajanand

at 04:42 on August 1st, 2008

I felt Cuil has a nice interface but the search results were less relevant . My thoughts in detail are available : http://blog.kwiqq.com/2008/07/28/is-cuil-less-relevant-search-engine-although-quicker/

rajanand has contributed a photo to this story.