Testing Cuil

Posted by nitzan on Tuesday, July 29th, 2008

Cuil
The search world is buzzing with the new search kid on the block, Cuil. Self-declared “World’s Biggest Search Engine”

Rather than rely on superficial popularity metrics, Cuil searches for and ranks pages based on their content and relevance. When we find a page with your keywords, we stay on that page and analyze the rest of its content, its concepts, their inter-relationships and the page’s coherency.

That’s fighting talk! I wonder what Google are thinking … as for me I am thinking “So what?”. After a certain size it is relevance that matters. It could only return one result from 10 but if it was the right result you would be happy.

Cuil is apparently pronounced “cool”. Hyeahright. Nobody I have shown the word has made that connection. “Kew-il” and “Quill” are the main attempts I have heard. Not quite “Go Google it” territory.

From the searches I have done, I don’t see that they are the biggest, but as the company is founded by ex-Google employees I guess they felt qualified to make that bold claim.

The service is brand new and therefore suffering many bugs and outages, but from what I see they have a pretty need search engine here. Most noticeable is the categorization of results, almost predicting what your next search would be.

Seeing as it is my birthday today, obviously my first search is for my own name.

It does a pretty good job, obviously I would prefer my own site ranks first, but it hits the Chris Garrett’s I would expect to see. Strangely it mixes up and miss-matches the images. Bizarre.

Google has both mindshare and is sitting pretty built right into firefox. Microsoft is throwing millions at trying to reverse this very issue, even while having billions of desktops and IE installations as leverage. My guess is the company will go majorly on a PR offensive aimed at VC cash and big buyout exit plan. End users will just be a way to getting access to Silicon Valley wallets.

Obviously it is early days but it might well be a search engine to keep an eye on … at least until Microsoft or Google buy it.

More coverage:

What do you think? A danger to Google or just a dud?