New Search Engine! Cuil
Wednesday, July 30th, 2008A new Search Engine was launched recently, Cuil, which intends to rival Google and claims to have indexed over 120 billion webpages.
Cuil is a product from some of Google’s finest former minds and is attracting alot of interest. Although we really shouldn’t draw comparisons between Cuil and Google this early after launch, we will. And by the way, Cuil is an old Irish word for knowledge.
Give Cuil a try at http://www.cuil.com
Cuil Features
Cuil looks quite good, but doesnt feel like a search engine to me. Infact Cuil feels more than a magazine. Cuil’s features include drilldown searching, roll-over definitions, tabbed searching and Google-style search suggestions. Tabbed searching in particular could be very useful for doing research.
This kind of excellant front-end innovation could allow Cuil to get a foothold in the highly competitive search industry providing the results from Cuil’s back-end are relevant.
Cuil Crawler: Twiceler
Cuil claims to have indexed 120 billion web pages, compared to Google’s 40 billion. Cuil crawls the web using Twiceler, it’s own custom built crawler which respects the robots.txt standard and even the crawl-delay directive which is a non-standard extension to reduce the crawler’s drain on your site’s bandwidth.
Cuil’s crawler, Twiceler, has indexed my site 63 times since Nov 2007 (8 months). Thats not alot.
Google on the otherhand has visited me 19,704 times in the same period. Google also has a variety of different crawlers ranging from the original Googlebot to Feedfetcher. So not only does Google appear alot more thorough than Cuil, but it also appears to be fresher with indexing being done on many different levels than Cuil.
It’s not clear to me at this time whether Cuil/Twiceler read sitemaps.
Cuil/Twiceler User Agent
Here’s the user agent string for Cuil’s crawler, Twiceler:
Cuil Results
The proof of the pudding lies in how accurate Cuil’s results are. Just because Cuil crawls something doesn’t mean they can make good sense of it.
So lets play around with Cuil and Google and try to find out about that episode of Seinfeld when George lies to a girl to impress her by saying he’s a Marine Biologist.
Googling ‘marine biology seinfeld’ will correctly bring up articles on the episode of Seinfeld ‘The Marine Biologist‘.
Cuil for ‘marine biology seinfeld’ and you get results about Marine Biologists, photos and profiles of Marine Biologists and a profile of Larry David, the creator of Seinfeld. So that first click gave us nothing.
The Cuil Explore By Category box has some links to Seinfeld Episodes and the episode is listed there. But when you click that, the search string now just gets longer and the Cuil results are in no way any more accurate to what we wanted. So that second click gave us nothing either. I’m sure on one of the subsequent pages the information we want is there, but I would’ve lost interest and Googled it by now.
So personally I think Cuil’s result relevancy right now is utter rubbish.
Cuil Management
Cuil’s Senior Management all seem to have long and prestigious careers in Silicon Valley; having been involved in major advances in search techniques. Most Cuil management have worked for Google at some point and have skills in Computer Science, Mathematics and/or AI.
Cuil claim to have written their search algorithms from scratch with the philosophy that all pages should be indexed and available for search, not just the popular pages. This is an interesting idea, but to be honest, pages that no-one reads, that few people link to and that probably havent been relevant for years are of little interest.
Maybe it would be good to use Cuil in the event that Google fails to find what you’re looking for. But then, how often does that happen? Its quite rare for me!
Most people who can’t find something using Google simply aren’t using it properly, so unless Cuil’s search and ranking algorithms are more intuitive and user-friendly, I don’t see the advantage.
Cuil vs. Google
Google have a long history of being very open and responsible with regard to competition, collaboration and the internet in general. But how do they feel about so many of their former employees launching Cuil in direct competition with them? Google said with regard to Cuil:
“[we welcome] competition that stimulates innovation and provides users with more choice.”
That seems very fair and sporting.
So, have any of you guys used Cuil? What do you think?
