New Google killer Cuil goes public – Why?
Monday is never a good day to be looking into new search engine algorithms, but Cuil seems to be getting a bit of attention. I’ve seen the video interview and demo and have had a chance to have a short play with it during lunch.
First thing to say about it, I hope the reason it keeps breaking down on me is due to the huge volumes of traffic interest it is already generating.
Next – I’m not a fan of the look and feel and general interface – It feels like a destination than a search tool, but that may just be me.
First thing I notice, is the claim of a 120+ billion pages index – wonder how many of them are spam
Next I’m reading the About Us page try to ignore the rock circle to the left and this line grabs me
‘Rather than rely on superficial popularity metrics, Cuil searches for and ranks pages based on their content and relevance.’
Ok, so Google beat Altavista by using popularity to judge credibility, but these guys have found away to judge the quality of content based on the content…interesting.
Then I read this line -
‘We believe that analyzing the Web rather than our users is a more useful approach, so we don’t collect data about you and your habits, lest we are tempted to peek.’
How could Google have gotten it so utterly wrong?
Time to search – first my favourite search, especially useful for the claim the web can define relevance better than users. Search for ‘table’ and sure enough, lots of tables from HTML, to table tennis and the periodic table. Must admit there’s more of choice of table than with Google, but like Google a distinct lack of plain old furniture. But in the Explore by category box, they do have what most people were looking for.
So categorisation of content is a big part of Cuil and I kind of like it.
Actually I lie – my first search was for me ‘Nilhan’ where I’m number one in Google and at least 6 of the top 10 refer to me. Cuil is not a fan ;) In the top 20 the closest I get is an SEOMoz profile – hmmm not using links for authority??
Next i’m thinking of stop words – Google likes to ignore stop words (it, the, from, to etc..) – Search for ‘flights from paris’ using Cuil, and you get pages containing the exact phrase and ‘from’ is included not ignored. Same search in Google, will return anything with ‘flights’ and ‘paris’ – ‘from’ is ignored or treated as a wild card. So again Cuil does well here
Next that other puzzle search engines have had to solve – when are two words a phrase and not just two words? So I search for ‘holidays to new york’ and Google brings back the usual suspects. Same search in Cuil and the first site talk about New Zealand, the next about apartments in Argelès-sur-Mer – Malaga, Disneyland Paris and self catering in France and there’s just one site referring to the big apple.
Then I search for ‘holidays in york’ and as expected, lots of listings about New York – Wrong!
Not having any geo-targeting capabilities makes it a real pain to use. Most of my results tended to be from the US (hmmm not using links at all?).
Must get back to some real work. First impressions, not a Google killer and not entirely sure what the fuss is. Some of the features like categorisation is cool, but doesn’t feel new. May be I’m really missing something here
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Jesus, work on your grasp of written English, its semi retarded!, and I’m shocked, are you really so stupid?