New Search Engine: Cuil

Pronounced "cool", this search engine is engineered (HA!) by ex-Googlers was opened to the public yesterday.

http://www.cuil.com

I found it interesting and, honestly, I'll give it its fair shot. Honestly, no matter what comes out of Google, they are no longer a "search engine" to me. They're an ad-driven web appliance development corporation.

If Cuil can stay a search engine, maybe it'll have a niche "we only do search.

Yahoo!, Google... anybody think of these are 'search engine' companies anymore?

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Originally posted by karahd

I found it interesting and, honestly, I'll give it its fair shot. Honestly, no matter what comes out of Google, they are no longer a "search engine" to me. They're an ad-driven web appliance development corporation.

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I'd say that is accurate.

I have to say that calling their search engine "cuil" is a hideously stupid idea. Words that do not sound the way they are spelled are terrible for building word of mouth. When a friend has to spell out the word, and you have to remember how to spell it, you have lost a lot of potential usage.

Their site says: "Cuil is an old Irish word for knowledge. For knowledge, ask Cuil."

Well, that's nice. But that still isn't a good word choice for a web page.

Also, their page is too fancy. Another part of google's appeal was the ultra clean interface.

And why is the search box so far down and to the left? Wtf?

Oh and finally, my first few experimental searches brought back terrible results.

With that said, I'll keep trying it out because I have been less impressed with google's results over the last few years.

Cuil seems to not work too well for me, it couldn't find many things I tried to search for. Also there is no Image search, which is probably the #1 thing I use on Google.

It's slower to load search results, and though it does display them with a little image from the site, I don't think that is worth it for the time it takes for them to populate the page. Even the first page to search from loads slowly.

There are some interface features that I question as well, most importantly not being able to click through pages 1, 2, 3, 4, etc at the top of the page as well as the bottom. I understand the logical semantic of deciding that you want to continue because you've reached the bottom of the page, but at the same time, i often scroll back up to see if my search criteria were what i thought I'd entered, so I don't want to have to scroll all the way back down to do it again.

On the "fancier interface", my initial reaction was...COOL. I like how it is presented.

Now, obviously, this is their first public view. As we know, things change, grow and adapt so we'll see how it pans out in the near future.

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Originally posted by karahd
PThey're an ad-driven web appliance development corporation.

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How so? I don't see any advertisements when I go to their homepage or do a web search.

Wherever there is money to be made it will be done. So I bet if cuil makes google popularity/stock size they will do the same thing.

Cuil does seem a bad choice... But so was Wii when it first came out. I don't think a mature audience is gonna take to a play on the word "cool."

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Originally posted by Savaric
How so? I don't see any advertisements when I go to their homepage or do a web search.

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Thats probably because Google doesn't do the whole banner ad thing, they do however have ads on their site. "Sponsored Links" are Ads based on what you are searching for.

Google also has a Google Ads program, which people put on their site and it displays ads based on content on the website.

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Originally posted by Savaric

Cuil does seem a bad choice... But so was Wii when it first came out. I don't think a mature audience is gonna take to a play on the word "cool."

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Wii doesn't need to trade on its name - it trades on Nintendo. People go to the store and ask for the latest Nintendo console. Nintendo is already a massively well established brand in the video game industry.

The next console from Nintendo, Microsoft, or Sony could be the "Garblefargletonga" and it wouldn't matter. People would just go to the store and ask for the new Nintendo/Msft/Sony console.

The results page of this Cuil engine sucks. Why do I want all that excess spam for my search results. No wonder google shed these morons. They didn't learn anything about what made google a great search engine.

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Originally posted by Aristotle
With that said, I'll keep trying it out because I have been less impressed with google's results over the last few years.

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What's been less than impressing you about Google lately?

My peeve with Google has been their move towards heavier interfaces - but that's going to be less of an issue if I get myself the new mobile internet connection I've been looking at.

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Originally posted by karahd
There are some interface features that I question as well, most importantly not being able to click through pages 1, 2, 3, 4, etc at the top of the page as well as the bottom. I understand the logical semantic of deciding that you want to continue because you've reached the bottom of the page, but at the same time, i often scroll back up to see if my search criteria were what i thought I'd entered, so I don't want to have to scroll all the way back down to do it again.

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Also, there's the obvious tabbed-browsing method of dealing with umpteen pages of something. You load the first one, then ctrl-click (or middle-click) 2, 3, 4, then go through reading page 1. Ctrl-F4 to move to the next page, which has already loaded.

Incidentally, did anyone notice that Cuil are advertising the number of pages crawled, same as Google used to - but Google no longer do? There was a time when "My database is bigger than your database" is significant, but now, who cares how many pages you have? All that matters is what types of things you crawl - and Google has that one sewn up (you do a Google search, and you can get PDF, DOC, etc, etc, etc results, and you can even convert them to HTML to view them).

I tried a couple of test searches in Cuil. Searching for [threshold rpg] comes up with www.thresholdrpg.com first, which is good, but searching for [rosuav] doesn't show up my blog OR www.rosuav.com on the first page - it's almost all Wikis.

One thing that I found distinctly weird was the columnation. The page for [rosuav] has three columns, and on this screen there's four results in the first, four in the second, and three in the third; and the third column is significantly shorter than the other two (doesn't even hit the bottom of the screen, whereas the others scroll). That tells my eyes that the list is DONE. The fact that there's another "X" pages of results is then a surprise, because my brain is not expecting anything more. Since the pagination is on a non-scrolling footer, it's actually quite easy to miss.

The final thing that annoyed me was the tampering with the input field. When I went back to the original search page, my search string was gone - and what's more, the usual Firefox form-fillout recall was not active. This is a PAIN, because I frequently want to go back to a previous search string and modify it. It does seem to have something akin to Google Suggest, but I'd rather see my past searches first. (The Firefox search box has a good solution to that. You get search history, then a line, and "Suggestions" under that.)

I'm not going to use Cuil for serious searches any time soon, for the above reasons and because there is no way - or at least, no obvious way - to do search operators. Google for [aristotle OR dalaena] and you'll see a whole lot of results for the Greek philosopher, having nothing to do with the word 'dalaena'. I see no way to do this in Cuil.

Side point: The Cuil database seems to be quite out of date, further invalidating their much-touted number of web pages. Google for [aristotle or dalaena] (which is not an either-or search) and you see results from Thresh forums; search Cuil for it, and you get a number of hits on pages that don't seem to be there any more.

Google has managed to be an advertising company that provides serious services. I don't know how Cuil will be funded long-term, but search results don't _in themselves_ bring in any revenue, and a useful search engine costs a fair bit in hardware and connectivity. Either they're going to put explicit ads on places, or they're going to accept money to push sites to higher rankings... or they're going to get funded from something completely unrelated (which basically means subsidizing the search engine from some other service).

Good luck to them. If they can make some serious improvements, they might have something good enough to be "the other search engine"; but they're not likely to kick Google out of #1 position, I think.

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Originally posted by Rosuav
What's been less than impressing you about Google lately?

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A lot of worthless results basically. Perhaps more people are gaming their algorithms now, I don't know. But I get less useful results now and have to go through more chaff to find what I want.

But it still stomps this Cuil in the dirt, even for the most basic functionality. These Cuil guys seem to be deliberately ignoring a lot of the things that made google so successful.

Well it's only been up for a day or two.

Oh... sponsored links. I never realized that was spam, I never payed any attention to them. Damn that, now I'm gonna start noticing it as spam that someone's making money on. God damn, does our entire economy run on advertisements?

Whenever you have to explain the pronunciation and/or meaning of your product, it's an automatic tune out for me.
Seems to me like they overlooked a pretty simple and fundamental marketing principal in their name choice.

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Originally posted by Savaric
Well it's only been up for a day or two.

Oh... sponsored links. I never realized that was spam, I never payed any attention to them. Damn that, now I'm gonna start noticing it as spam that someone's making money on. God damn, does our entire economy run on advertisements?

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It's only been open to the public for a day or two. Obviously they've had their crawler running for ages.... or else they stole Google's database before they left, and never re-crawled.

Does our entire economy run on advertisements? Hmm.... No, but pretty close to. The fact is, advertising does work - or at least, people think it does - so businesses will spend money there to try to gain a competitive advantage. It's possible to run a business without ever spending money on advertising, but in this day and age, it's getting pretty uncommon.

Some companies offer clearly-marked adverts and make no secret of the fact. Others are more subtle, and sell "premium placement" in a listing. But either way, they have to make money. If it's free to get listed and free to view the listings, then someone somewhere has to be paying for it.

Har har har. http://www.cuil.com/info/webmaster_info/ says:

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To all those who have contacted us to let us know that they are happy to have their site included in a Web index for the first time, thank you for being a part of the biggest search engine on the Web—Cuil!

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How do you measure biggest? Like I said above, Google already have the non-HTML crawling sewn up. Also, a simple look at whois records tells you that Cuil is an upstart but Google know what they're doing... Do a quick whois on the IP address for www.cuil.com and/or any of the crawler IPs listed on the above page, and you'll see they're owned by XO Communications or Performance Systems International. Google's IPs are owned by.... Google. I think that says something about who's bigger.

I'm not going to consider them a force to be reckoned with until I start seeing cuil.com referers in my webalizer stats.

I didn't mean to suggest they were SPAM, per se.

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Originally posted by Savaric
Well it's only been up for a day or two.

Oh... sponsored links. I never realized that was spam, I never payed any attention to them. Damn that, now I'm gonna start noticing it as spam that someone's making money on. God damn, does our entire economy run on advertisements?

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Fun article with John C. Dvorak slaughtering Cuil.

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Originally posted by Aristotle
Fun article with John C. Dvorak slaughtering Cuil.

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Unsurprising that Google can find what you're looking for and prioritize the hits ably. That's what they're there for. Surprising, though, that what basically amounts to a Google splinter-group can't get major page results. What have they done? Abandon PageRank? Doubtless they can't use the name nor the database, but you can't copyright/patent the concept of deeming sites that have many links to them as more important than sites with few links. That's a massive oversimplification of PageRank, so if you devise something from the same basic principle and use some different specifics on top of it, I doubt Google's going to be able to sue you for stealing the idea. It'd be like Microsoft trying to claim that they invented the minimize button on the end of your title bar.

Actually, it seems that abandoning PageRank is precisely what they HAVE done.

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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.

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"Superficial"? Granted, it's possible to game the system, spamming links everywhere. But a search engine cannot be authoritative on everything. How can Cuil know what people are likely to look for? Google knows based on what people have previously looked for. (As an aside, even Google's paid ads are ranked by popularity. The ads with the highest click-through rate are shown highest on the page. Google expects its end users - the people doing the searches - will not click on irrelevant ads, and so CTR makes an excellent metric for sorting out the relevant from the useless.)

You know, webmasters have the power to affect whether or not a search engine is of any value. All they need to do is block one or other from crawling the site. As a webmaster, would you feel safe blocking Google? (Assume a significant proportion of your revenue comes from web site traffic.) At the moment, Google has enough marketshare that you'd see a significant drop in traffic if you block it. Cuil? I've yet to see any cuil.com referer entries in my logs, except now when I did a deliberate test. Incidentally, I think Cuil still has not crawled rosuav.com; Google did ages ago, even though I never explicitly submitted it.

A search across all logs for kepl.com.au for the month of August (given that Cuil went public in late July IIRC, going back earlier is pointless) shows the string 'cuil' occurring only in my test entries and in the crawler's UA. So... yeah, it increases our traffic. By the precise load of the crawler, and nothing more.