New Search Engine Cuil Takes Aim At Google 649
theodp writes "CNET reports that Cuil (pronounced 'Cool'), a startup founded by the husband-and-wife team of Xift creator Tom Costello and former Google search architect Anna Patterson, is launching a new search engine today that claims to index three times as many Web pages as Google." Running a few searches left me underwhelmed with the content of the results (hitting the next-page button on a search with a listed 62,200,000 results — for "seattle" — got me the unexpected error message "We didn't find any results for 'seattle.'"), but pleased with the actual layout of the results when it worked, so I hope the kinks are worked out. Update 7/28 18:30 GMT by SM: corrected Tom Costello's accreditation, he wasn't a professor at Stanford as the linked story suggests, just did some research there as a grad student. Thanks to the Stanford CS department for pointing this out.
"62,200,000 is meaningless" (Score:5, Insightful)
The number of search results does not mean anything, relevance is what is important - if what I want is not in the first 5 pages of search results I assume it doesn't exist (and I expect to find what I want on the first page 95% of the time).
Page Count Poor Metric To Compare Sites By? (Score:5, Insightful)
The best for them (Score:5, Insightful)
The best they can hope for anyways would be to be bought by Google. Either that or they'll stagnate due to scalability issues or even suffer a slow death.
Besides, "Search 121,617,892,992 web pages" and none from my website? Allow me to remain sceptical..
Re:Tried it (Score:5, Insightful)
Oh, and now all I get is "Due to overwhelming interest, our Cuil servers are running a bit hot right now. The search engine is momentarily unavailable as we add more capacity."
Slashdotted. That'll teach them to try to compete with Google, I guess :)
Re:Some random observations (Score:1, Insightful)
Cuil is a perfectly cromulent word.
And easy to pronounce just from the spelling.. if you are a Gaelic speaker.
CÃil is Irish for "rear" or "back".
Re:The name... (Score:3, Insightful)
Nonsense (Score:5, Insightful)
What mechanism will bring about this Google crash? Unlike the famous companies in the .com bubble, Google is actually making money. And lots of it. More than a billion dollars a quarter, to go along with their $12 billion in cash and zero debt.
This is not to say that Google will remain eternally dominant, of course not, but the rules of the game favor the incumbent, especially in a lobbyist economy.
You say Google will come crashing down, yet you also say no one will "ever" be as good in search. So I ask again, what mechanism or event do you foresee in your crystal ball to bring about such an unlikely crash?
Privacy Policy beats Google... (Score:3, Insightful)
It may need a few bugs ironed out and a bit of patience to see if it will catch up with Google in its technical capabilities, but it's already better than Google in the privacy department:
"Privacy is a hot topic these days, and we want you to feel totally comfortable using our service, so our privacy policy is very simple: when you search with Cuil, we do not collect any personally identifiable information, period. We have no idea who sends queries: not by name, not by IP address, and not by cookies (more on this later). Your search history is your business, not ours.
More precisely:
Logs
We do not keep logs of our users' search activity."
I think this could be a real selling point over Google if they can also provide a comparable search.
Could be a little smarter... (Score:4, Insightful)
I tried the classic "search yourself" trick with it. Searching my last name (Charabaruk), I got 11,429 results (and for the first page, only one of them wasn't to do with me specifically).
Searching the short version of my name, Chris Charabaruk, turned up nothing! Strange, because Twitter knows me by that (well, as my real name, not as my account) and that shows up when searching my surname. I tried again, though, and got 11,997 results. Quoting didn't change a thing.
I searched again for Christopher Charabaruk and got 1,395,435 results. Quoting that got me nothing, and retrying with the quotes on ditto.
It looks nice and shiny, but there's a hell of a lot of work required before I'd try making serious use of it.
Give it a chance to develop (Score:5, Insightful)
Google has been around for years.
Cuil has only just opened. Already, it is pretty decent.
I for one would love to have options to Google.
Re:Nonsense (Score:4, Insightful)
Greedy media companies, patent trolling lawyers, and stupid and/or corrupt judges.
Their spider is awful (Score:5, Insightful)
The first time I encountered Cuil was when I blocked their "twiceler" spider from my site. It was hammering it with thousands of requests for non-existent pages. It seemed it was generating URLs at random. It then ignored the robots.txt for ages.
Re:Some random observations (Score:3, Insightful)
"Cuil" is a really dumb name.
That seems to be the meme here, and that any new search engine is immediately written off if it does not match or exceed Google's index from the start (So it seems Google quest to create as big a barrier of entrance as possible has succeeded. Isn't intend and potential much more important for new players? If we are gonna be like this, yes, Google will remain king of the hill and grow up even more to the company that the money and market share dictates).
But about the name. I'd say that all the people complaining about the name never themselves actually register domain names and thus lack any initiative whatsoever. Not the best critics. Because if you would, you know there's a distinct difference between thinking of a good name, and thinking of a good name, which hasn't been registered yet. Systematically, everything short is gone, everything a bit larger and pronouncable or vaguely a word is gone.
I congratulate them on getting a 4 letter domain name which is vaguely pronouncable/recognizable as a real word.
Re:Nonsense (Score:5, Insightful)
Well that is a good question. I agree that my statements do seem contradictory. What I think is that the online ad business is going to end up as another bubble; companies are going to wise up and realize that the money they pay for ads on web sites like Google's are not worth nearly as much as they thought, and the trend will be to a large reduction in money spent on ads. And Google will feel a big crunch because of this, and because they've spent so much money on so many frivolous enterprises, and fostered such a lacsidasical corporate culture, they will simply not be able to produce any new products or online services with the capability of recovering their previous levels of revenue. Eventually, they will become marginalized and irrelevant.
My choice of phrase - "crashing down" - is admittedly poor, since this is something that I don't think will happen all at once, but will occur over a period of time, 5 - 8 years or so.
Re:"62,200,000 is meaningless" (Score:5, Insightful)
Cuil's claim to fame is that it indexes more pages than Google, not that it will give you more hits (though you would think that it would). That said, you are right in that it doesn't matter. So what if it is indexing 3x more pages. Are those pages worth indexing? I am really skeptical that a page that Google doesn't index for whatever reason is the page I am after when I search something.
There are only two things that matter when it comes to what happens after you hit the search button, the interface and the results in the first 1-5 pages. The rest is junk. Telling me that I got three trillion hits is like my computer reporting that it took seven billion calculations to open a program. Great. That is a fun fact, but I don't give a shit.
If you want to beat Google, you need something new. Natural language searches, search engines that act as agents continuously looking for things for you, whatever. Doing what Google does but supposedly slightly better just isn't enough. Google already does it good enough for most people. If you want to beat Google, you need to do something innovative that Google doesn't do... and then rest the temptation to not take the dump truck of money they offer you should they recognize you as competition worthy of being bought out.
Re:Cuil is Irish for knowledge (Score:2, Insightful)
Of all the languages to find an alternate word for knowledge, why would they choose Irish? Maybe it's different in the rest of the world but in Australia the Irish are the butt of many jokes, eg if "An Australian, and Englishman, and an Irishman walk into a bar", the Irishman will always be the idiot of the three (unless it's the one where the barman says "What? Is this some kind of joke?").
If I can take The Simpsons as a reliable measure of American culture (and I know I can :) I'd guess it's true in the USA too.
Re:Give it a chance to develop (Score:2, Insightful)
If they're claiming to index "three times as many webpages as google" I would at least expect a result of some sort. I understand their page ranking logic may be different but I would think I would at least appear.
The interface does look nice but so does a supermodel. That doesn't mean they're going to give me intelligent responses that I can use.
Failed already... (Score:5, Insightful)
these guys fell at the first fence. They have to include an explanation of how to pronounce their product name.
That's such a basic mistake it's laughable. If you want to build a global brand, starting with a name people can't remember or pronounce will not help.
cuil isnt cool (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Give it a chance to develop (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Tried it (Score:4, Insightful)
But Cuil doesn't need that extension..what's your point?
Re:Failed already... (Score:3, Insightful)
Just try telling your friends to browse slashdot.
http:///..com [..com] is generally the end result.
Column format gives them a perceptual advantage (Score:4, Insightful)
With google all the results are ranked. With Cuil you mind is not quite sure if things in the same row are the same rank or what. As a result you may be inclined to scan down further till you see the picture you think is right.
in the end however you read just as many entries, but somehow the perception is that the right one was "closer to the top". But that's perceptual not actual.
Howver perception counts: if you can more quickly absorb 2-d layouts than 1-d then it's better. But of course google to do this to.
the quality of the search seems lower.
Give it a break (Score:1, Insightful)
Well, its early days. Google wasn't built in a day. Yes i tried a few queries and the returned results were 'naff'. However give it time, and it'll learn and refine itself. Google wasn't good in the beginning but it got better over time.
Just like the MS effect, i think we've all got very used to the 'google' interface/layout, and it will take time to move from it.
However competition is good, and even if it doesn't work out Medium/long term, hopefully it will up the game of other players in the market.
David J (IT Manager)
www.joots.co.uk (great place for jewellery online)
Re:Grammar Nazi: (Score:3, Insightful)
Not going anywhere (Score:4, Insightful)
First of all, from CNN's article, Patterson enjoyed her time at Google, but became disenchanted with the company's approach to search. "Google has looked pretty much the same for 10 years now," she said, "and I can guarantee it will look the same a year from now."
This is part of what works for Google. It's reliable, consistent and simple, from a user's point of view. If it ain't broke, don't fix it.
My "reference search" was for "CREB", a protein. As with google, the first result was the Wikipedia article on CREB. After that, Cuil went to hell. The second result is "Uberpedia", which cloned the wikipedia article. The third result was for the same article (no longer existing) on a polish server. The 4th result was useful. The 5th result was some sort of wikipedia related server called adorons.com, but it returns an error referring you back to wikipedia. The 6th result, somewhat useful. The 7th result, another non-existent wikipedia copy on a polish server.
In addition, wikipedia offered 600K results vs. Cuil's 100K results. If they're indexing more, why are they returning fewer results?
I don't see myself using this anytime soon.
Re:Really only 43,684,588 pages? (Score:3, Insightful)
Thanks for that :) That's quite an interesting find. I eagerly await future articles on the issue.
Re:Really only 43,684,588 pages? (Score:3, Insightful)