Is Cuil a Google Killer?
Cuil (pronounced cool) was launched earlier this week by a group of ex-Googlers looking to improve upon the power of Google without all the potential privacy pitfalls of keeping tabs on its users. The stark black home page is a sort of anti-Google -- it's simple, but almost menacing in its darkness. Compared to Google, Cuil's search results are much more detailed. Instead of a list of text links, Cuil provides you with three columns of four results on the first page, each with a thumbnail photo, a title, an address, and an excerpt of text or description of the page. Results can be narrowed down by clicking tabbed links for additional searches (similar to Google's "refine results" links) or by choosing categories from a widget box that will pop up on the right hand side when searching for something like "mole," which can be an animal, sauce, or TV show.
Cuil claims to have the largest index of searchable pages on the Web, though judging by search results this is a clear misrepresentation of the facts. Many searches on Google which would return hundreds of thousands or millions of links (like say "Saten Island" for example), turn up less than half as many on Cuil.
Cuil seems to be struggling through growing pains. In our brief experience with it this week, we found that sometimes searches turned up 0 results, only to return 2 million results when we tried the same search two minutes later. Even basic things like the links to the contact us, FAQ, and features pages were consistently inaccessible.
Cuil may have a bright future one day, but for the moment, it simply isn't strong enough to run with the big boys. [Source: Cuil]
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
Crypt2121 said 10:15AM on 8-01-2008
The result aren't anywhere as good as Google.
However, this: "Many searches on Google which would return hundreds of thousands or millions of links (like say "Saten Island" for example), turn up less than half as many on Cuil," may not be correct.
Google returns an ESTIMATE, not an exact count. Typically, most large result sets give out far short of the max.
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Emma said 1:15PM on 8-01-2008
I've never even heard of this Cuil thing. I use Google.
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UHUH said 2:28PM on 8-01-2008
I tried Cuil this week. The privacy policy is a big plus over google. I ran into the same search problems as described, but I chalked it up to be startup bugs. Given time this should be a great search engine. I would like to see them add free email. That would really give google a case of the cold sweats. As for not returning a kazillion search returns, who cares? After the first 2 pages of search returns I give up. I have already replaced the Yahoo quick search link in crazybrowser with Cuil. Can't wait till they really get rolling.
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nj said 2:58PM on 8-01-2008
I agree. I was excited to hear about Cuil, as I am always eager to test new technologies. But I noticed that many of the results for common things were very irrelevant; it does not seem to do as good of a job finding WHAT YOU WANT TO FIND . On top of that, all of the "big boys" allow you to do separate image searches after doing a web search; Cuil seems to think that this is not important which is a careless and silly design flaw as far as I'm concerned.
Cuil is dead already. It's too bad, because when I heard that its chief architect was an ex-Google engineer, I assumed it would be simply awesome.
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UHUH said 5:31PM on 8-01-2008
C'mon man. Give it a chance. There have to be a few bugs.Wait for Cuil v2 before you start bashing. Right now they are just getting their feet wet. From what I see they are off to a really good start. It's a much better interface than anyone else has come up with.
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Paul H. said 12:04PM on 8-02-2008
Having heard a lot a buzz about the Cuil search engine, I decided to give it a side-by-side trial with Google, using separate tabs in Firefox. After only a few minutes of searching for information and photos on lakes in the California Sierra Nevada (hardly an exotic topic), I closed the Cuil tab vowing never to return, as the Cuil search engine seemed more like a prank or a tool directed at the cognitively impaired than a serious effort at improving web searching.
Not only did Cuil fail miserably at retrieving the desired information and pictures, the links and associated thumbnail photos usually had nothing to do with one another. In one instance, clicking on a photo taken at a lake near Yosemite took me to a website located in Florida! Using Google's sophisticated search syntax, however, yielded up dozens of *relevant* results within seconds. "Cuil" may indeed rhyme with "cool", but it also rhymes with "fool", which is what a person would have to be to rely on the Cuil engine for serious searching.
There is a reason for Google's search hegemony: it works. Cuil doesn't and it is just that simple.
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