Cuil, cooler than Google?
Posted by Manuela Barreto @ July 29th, 2008 in Search Engine Marketing
Hats off to Cuil. Seriously. I think we have to give these guys some credit.
Although I wouldn’t want to jump into conclusions, I can personally say we definitely need some time to digest the new search engine. The $33 million venture capital was up and running early this week, hence it is still in its launching process and receiving its first search requests.
Just to give you some background information, the search engine was designed by Anna Patterson and a couple other engineers, all ex-Googlers.
One of the main highlights; Cuil claims its search index spans over 120 billion web pages. That would be three times as much as Google and ten times as much as Microsoft. Impressive.
In terms of privacy, Cuil started off quite well since it does not retain any information about its users’ search history…not the case for Google. That’s a plus right there for Cuil.
In terms of design, I agree with some of the things Stan Shroeder from Mashable brings up. To compare Google’s against Cuil’s platform would be a waste of time. But right off the bat, you can tell they are drastically different when it comes to displaying search results.
Go ahead, have a look at it yourself on http://www.cuil.com/ My first impression, honestly, not the best one. It is still a bit shocking, specially the whole black screen and placement of elements within the site.
Like I said before, it’ll take some time before Cuil may begin growing on people, however, you must give credit to what credit is due. At least these guys had the guts to come up and launch their very own search engine, whether they’ll be better or more efficient than Google, time can only tell.
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Comments
Nick Stamoulis
July 30th, 2008
Great concept but they definitely need to fix some kinks before claiming its bigger and better than Google!!
m.barreto
July 30th, 2008
Hey Nick!
Exactly. And they’ve only been out for what…2 days?!
patience is a virtue…we’ll see.
Andy
July 31st, 2008
Heey,
Is a good concept, very brave to start a competition on this market against google. I hope they’ll succed :D
anna
August 1st, 2008
They definetely overdesign it and lost the main purpose of any search engine - to provide fast, efficient and easy to use results:
- so much graphic will not make happy people with slow internet connection;
- strange layout is more confusing than useful;
- microscopic text is hard to read even if you want;
Although i like the idea with category filter…
Also 120 billion pages database mostly does not say anythig - it isn’t garantee relevance.
So, if this is all that they can propose - alternative interface and 120+ bill. pages database - it is not a strong point to prefer it to google.
m.barreto
August 1st, 2008
Hey Andy,
yes, I completely agree, brave guys! although we’re beginning to see clashing opinions on the matter…there are those who are already loving it, others, not really.
m.barreto
August 1st, 2008
Anna hi!
You’re right on a lot of things, in my opinion..however, I think we’re all anticipating things way ahead of time.
BUT– I also think they were moving a bit too fast when they began claiming superiority over Google…
Peter
August 7th, 2008
Has anyone actually used it….its rubbish. The problem is over indexing. The internet has a lot of crap/dead/useless sites. I think this is a case of quantity over quality.
Peter
August 7th, 2008
also here are some other “brave” sites that have not so successfully comepeted against Google;
Open Text (1995-1997)
Magellan (1995-2001)
Infoseek (1995-2001)
Snap (1997-2001)
Direct Hit (1998-2002)
Lycos (1994; reborn 1999; barely noticeable)
WebCrawler (1994; reborn 2001; barely noticeable)
Yahoo (1994; reborn 2002; now serving Google ads)
Excite (1995; reborn 2001; barely noticeable)
HotBot (1996; reborn 2002; barely noticeable)
Ask Jeeves (1998; reborn 2002; barely noticeable)
AltaVista (1995 – present; good for redundant searches)
LookSmart (1996 – present; look who?)
AllTheWeb (1999 – present; all the who?)
Teoma (2000 – present; never heard of before)
AOL Search (1997 – present; has any one used this in the new millennium)
MSN Search (1998 – present; if your desperate and there’s no Google or Yahoo)
Meg
August 7th, 2008
Don’t forget Dogpile…not sure what went wrong there, but it’s wrong for sure.
m.barreto
August 7th, 2008
There you go!
Get that one on the list too , Peter!