Review of Cuil

A competitor to Google has entered the stage. The new entrant is Cuil (pronounced COOL). As their press release states,

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.

Why Cuil says (claims) they are better

Cuil claims their index is better

Cuil claims they index over 120 billion pages ("more than any other search engine"), which they state would be more than 3 times the size of Google's index. And this would be quite the feat. Scouring the web is expensive. What makes Google so great (and valued) is not only its index but also the architecture it created to support indexing. Google spends over 1 billion every year just to support its back end architecture. Cuil says it can do it cheaper -- 1/10th the cost of Google.

Cuil claims they have better search

Cuil also says it understands how words are related. As Techcrunch reports, it aims to understand relationship of words such as french, wine and cheese. It then categorizes it. Now you can explore by category (dogs) and get results that don't even have that keyphrase in it (cocker spaniel). The end result -- more relevant searches.

Cuil claims their interface is better

Also new is the interface. Instead of the listings across the screen, the results are listed in a 3 column matrix.

Cuil makes privacy claims

Cuil doesn't track IP information and no cookies are used.

Review of Cuil by a Search Engine Marketer

This announcement comes at quite an interesting time. Google now represents some 60%+ of the search space, distantly followed by Yahoo (21%) and MSN/Live (9%). Note: it was just 2 years ago that Google was 42% of the search space.

But this may be a situation more of timing and less of quality.

Danny Sullivan has a great review of the "index size wars" and why this metric doesn't mean much.

A sample search for my name "David Felfoldi" on Google found 880 results. My blog came first, followed by my Linked-In and Facebook profiles. Article submissions followed.

Cuil found 287,000+ results. The results were mostly repetitive and/or copied article submissions. Five pages deep I still hadn't seen my blog, facebook, or linked-in profile link. Also, every result had a photo associated with it, which rarely had anything to do with the results. So Cuil did indeed find many more results. But the quality of those listings, and the sorting, are highly suspect.

I wonder about their future business model. For a search marketer, Google provides user information that is pivotal to their customers ad campaigns. You know, the ones that help connect you to a good or service when you type in a query and the organic results don't seem to work? While I can be romantic and think that someone spent millions of dollars for a nifty online tool, I can also be a realist and accept that it came at a cost -- tracking my online usage of their tool. Perhaps there can be some more transparency on behalf of some of the major search engines, but a zero tolerance policy sounds extreme.

Also, maybe some people want search results personalization. If so, apparently they are not to go to Cuil.

To end on a good note, I do like the interface as a whole. It makes better use of larger resolutions, which are quickly becoming the norm. However, this can't be Cuil's only saving grace. Interfaces are easily copied.

Other Great Reviews of Cuil

Search Engine Guide Review of Cuil
Search Engine Land review of Cuil