07.29.08

Too Cuil for School?

Posted in Online Marketing at 4:33 am by Jono

Yesterday saw the announcement of a brand new search engine called Cuil (pronounced “cool”).

They bill themselves as the biggest search engine on the Internet – attesting to search more pages than anyone else (three times as many as Google and ten times as many as Microsoft). No doubt a bold claim and potential fighting-talk.

I was under the impression Google had found roughly a trillion pages… not sure I can be bothered to count them – so I’ll take their word for it. Cuil claim to have 120-billion pages in their index which is far short of this. (Although not all of Google’s trillion appear in their index).

Cuil aims to provide results which are organised based on web page content analysis. In their own words:

Cuil provides organized and relevant results based on Web page content analysis. The search engine goes beyond today’s search techniques of link analysis and traffic ranking to analyze the context of each page and the concepts behind each query. It then organizes similar search results into groups and sorts them by category.

In terms of their philosophy, Cuil reckon that their newly developed architecture and algorithms are far more robust and able to handle the rapidly mushrooming Internet and organise the results in a way that reflect its enormous complexity…

They outline their four guiding principles as:

1. Size matters and bigger is better – they claim to index everything and therefore provide more accurate results.
2. Popularity is useful but not necessarily important – relevancy is more than a numbers game.
3. Organisation is pivotal. Instead of ‘ten blue links’ Cuil reckon they organises the information by context.
4. Analysis for the web, not the users – they analyse the pages not click-throughs.

Correct me if I’m wrong, but, I’ve always been under the impression that Google’s guiding-light has always been relevance to the user. I also think that they’ve come a long way from counting links.

Relevance and context is the way the web has been moving anyway with refinements such as XHTML and the advent of notions such as a semantic web and latent indexing.

I guess I just think it’s a little arrogant of Cuil to imply that user experience is lacking on major SEs like Google, where I think it’s clear for all to see that the focus has always been on the user. In fact, it’s top of their Ten Things about Google list.

In terms of appearance, the Cuil interface looks pretty good. I’m not entirely convinced though. Sure, they’ve got fancy roll-overs and pretty pictures – but when you click on those results, often the image isn’t even on the page.

I will say, that SEs focusing on visual results perhaps do offer something a little different to what we’ve come to expect from the likes of Google, MSN Live and Yahoo!, but does this equate to quality and relevance?

I doubt it.

In my opinion, Cuil is a nice try, but I really think they have a long way to go before they can really compete with the big boys.

In the world of search it’s about relevance and speed – I’m not sure they provide either.

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