Former Google Employees Try Their Hand at Being Cuil
Cuil is a search engine that came to life today, July 28, 2008. Cuil was conceived by former employees of Google. Cuil’s founders are Anna Patterson, tom Costello, Russell Power and Louis Monier, all former Google employees. Tom Costello has worked for IBM and various other companies.
To differentiate itself, Cuil organizes web pages by content and displays relatively long entries along with thumbnail pictures for many results. It claims to have a larger index than any other search engine, with about 120 billion web pages.
Unlike other search engines,Cuil’s privacy policy states that it does not store records of users’ search activity or IP addresses.
Now for the nitty gritty: how does it REALLY work?
Well, the first day doesn’t bode to well. Cuil was down for most of its launch day. According to Cnet’s interview, Cuil suffered from heavy first-day overloads and VP of communications Vince Sollitto said Cuil “will only improve with time. It’s day one. Traffic is massive. We’re new. There are bugs to fix, results to improve.”
When I searched for “free food” my first time using Cuil, I got zero results. Then I turned off safe search and it bumped up to 142, 853. If it’s trying to compete with Google, its sorely lacking. The same result got me 66,500,000 results in Google. Those numbers just don’t add up. Ok, so it might take time. But before we start comparing to Google, lets wait for better results.
Another big wrench in its nascent “Google killer” rep? No advertising. Now, I like that, but if it can’t come up with an advertising platform to rival Google’s, it hasn’t a hope of besting it. One of the biggest advantages of Google’s massive advertising platform is that it allows for better search results.
Cuil claims it won’t monitor a user’s search habits in order to target advertising the way Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft do. That’s an admirable goal, but that information is what has allowed all the search engines to refine their algorithms and provide more relevant results.
IMHO, the best Cuil is looking at for the time being is solidifying itself in a niche position and presenting itself as an attractive acquisition for the big kahunas: Yahoo, MSN, Google. For now, I’ll wait while it bumps along and stick with using a sure bet: Google.
Related posts:
Nice to have a new kid on the block. Good luck.
We’ll have to wait and see what happens here. It will be nice to have some new blood in the game. I like how they display results.
@Dan Luck being the operative word;p We’ll have to see what happens.
@Neels I like the idea of Cuil, I just think the implementation needs some work. But too, it remains to be seen where it will actually go. I think it will settle into a niche, like but we can always hope it will give Google and the others a run for their money at some point.
I would rather get 142,000 relevent results than 66,000,000 full-of-garbage. Who has time to even look at 142,000? Do people actually spend time on the internet searching for free food? I like getting search results that are “pre-sifted” for content, because content is what I am searching for. As for advertising, I assume they will monetize. Google wasn’t a money pit when they first started either.
I just used and was pleased, our website came up a top ranking right away. its http://www.loffreno.com,
I like the way it looks too, with the logo or info on the websites listed. Good luck!