The Next Google: Cuil.com
July 28th, 2008 by SplineGuy
A new search engine is on the scene with potential to rival the famous Google search algorithm. Indexing more than three times as many pages as Google and using a new approach, there may be something to this newcomer. I haven’t played with it much but will definitely keep my eye on it.
Check out the story here: Ex-Google engineers debut ‘Cuil’ way to search
From their own site: Cuil.com
Welcome to Cuil—the world’s biggest search engine. The Internet has grown. We think it’s time search did too.
The Internet has grown exponentially in the last fifteen years but search engines have not kept up—until now. Cuil searches more pages on the Web than anyone else—three times as many as Google and ten times as many as Microsoft.
Rather than rely on superficial popularity metrics, Cuil searches for and ranks pages based on their content and relevance. When we find a page with your keywords, we stay on that page and analyze the rest of its content, its concepts, their inter-relationships and the page’s coherency.
Then we offer you helpful choices and suggestions until you find the page you want and that you know is out there. We believe that analyzing the Web rather than our users is a more useful approach, so we don’t collect data about you and your habits, lest we are tempted to peek. With Cuil, your search history is always private.
Cuil is an old Irish word for knowledge. For knowledge, ask Cuil.
Check it out. Tell me what you’ve heard about it and what you think of it.
Unfortunately, from my initial testing, the results are not very relevant. Hopefully they can refine their algorithm but for now, at least, it seems more hype than anything.
I’m pretty sure they are just demoing their spider/crawler. The results are awful as well as the picture pairing is terrible. For instance, search “wordpress” and the wordpress.org page show a picture of some news team.
I’m pretty sure they just want to show the world that their crawler is better than Google’s so someone like Microsoft, Ask, or Yahoo! will buy them and pair it with some decent ranking system.
I wasn’t at all impressed. A couple of my initial requests were not filled at all, the server was busy. When I googled my name my company name and city, it promptly reported several hits. When I did the same on Cuil, the results were “We didn’t find any results for . . .” Cuil certainly doesn’t seem to be anything to crow about, but I would be interested in knowing how they have generated so much hype based on so little substance.
Hmm, your readers did not give it very high marks, did they? If Cuil is heuristic, it may take some time for it to get up to speed.
We just returned from our fifth trip to Kenya. It was full of new experiences about which I am beginning to blog, if you are interested.
I’m not impressed either. Do you know how hard it was to find a reference to my blog–when I typed in the name of the blog???!!!