Another new search engine
Google has shown that the business of search can be very profitable. Naturally, Google’s profits have attracted the creation of a lot of would-be Googles. People keep coming up with new search engines. But as even mighty Microsoft has found out, the search game is not that easy. Still, people keep trying to find the apparent pot of gold that a successful search venture seems to promise. The latest is something called Cuil and it is attracting a lot of attention. I presume that the fact that former Google employees are involved is one thing that catches the attention of the blogosphere. Even the New York Times notes the the new search engine:
On Monday, their company, Cuil, is unveiling a search engine that they promise will be more comprehensive than Google’s and that they hope will give its users more relevant results.
Among the many other commentaries, TechCrunch says:
Search engine Cuil launched earlier this evening, claiming a bigger index size (120 billion web pages) than Google or any other search engine. The pedigree of the founders and execs, which includes three ex senior Googlers, means the service will be compared to Google from day one. And the way they will be compared is index size and, more importantly, relevance/ranking of results.
We’ve been testing the engine for the last hour. Based on our test queries Cuil is an excellent search engine, particularly since it is all of an hour old. But it doesn’t appear to have the depth of results that Google has, despite their claims. And the results are not nearly as relevant.
I tried a few queries at the new site and I was not in the least impressed. It’s early days, of course, but I think Cuil has a long way to go to challenge any of the top three search engines, let alone Google.
If anybody else tries it, let us know what you think about the new search facility.
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I fully agree. When I tried it yesterday, searching for “cuil” failed to return the search engine’s home page. Also several other test searches that I commonly use returned less than totally useful results.
See also
http://digitaldaily.allthingsd.com/20080728/totall-uncuil/
and
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB121721408704288951.html
Regards,
Joel