What’s so cool about Cuil? reviews

Cuil is a new search engine that has been making a lot of news in the web world since it’s launch yesterday. First covered by the one and only Techcrunch as well as numerous other outlets and independent bloggers big and small, even getting a seal of approval from Matt Mullenweg. Me on the other hand? I’m not so much of a fan.

I’m trying to find a saturated field to start a new project in. Oh, there it is – a search engine!

The story behind Cuil is fairly simple. The project was created by four individuals, three of which were all former Google employees. They all have backgrounds in the search field, so it made sense for them to be the engineers behind Cuil. What Cuil boasts about the most is its impressive index size – one of 121,617,892,992 pages – a number three times larger than Google, according to the companies own about page. Cuil also promises immense privacy by not logging your searches or your IP address. But beyond that, not much catches my eye.

The Design

Cuil takes a much different approach when it comes to displaying search results than just about any other search engine. Rather than the continuous vertical search results page, Cuil displays things in a grid format. You can chose between a two or three column layout. Results are broken down into “tabs” with “relevant” search terms, and page navigation for the results are found at the bottom of the page.

To me, Cuil reads more like a news magazine than a search engine. When I’m searching for something, I don’t want to see things in a grid view. Cuil very much reminds me of individual posts and excerpts, sometimes even with a thumbnail image, and not like I’m viewing search results. If this is the future design of search engines, I personally think we’re moving in the wrong direction.

The Results

Interestingly, the results of Cuil are not so much up to par as you might expect from a site aiming at taking down Google. Let’s take a look at some test searches, shall we?

First, I started off with a search of the Boston Redsox. As I stated briefly above, one of the features of the Cuil design is the relevant search term tabs. With a search of the “Redsox“, I was presented with tab choices of: Boston Redsox, Redsox Tickets, Redsox Basebal, Redsox Nation, and Damon Redsox. Pretty good, except for the last one considering that Damon has not played for the Redsox since 2004.

Another feature Cuil offers in its design in the ability to narrow searches down by categories, which appear on most search result pages. For that same search term of the “Redsox”, most of the categories were accurate, except for the last two. The categories I was shown included: Boston Redsox Players, Boston Redsox Managers, Major League Pitchers, Australian Television Networks, and New York Giants Managers. Obviously, the last two don’t make much sense, considering this has nothing to do with Australia or the NFL.

Most importantly, there was the amount of search results themselves: 2,250,000 for Google and only 94,140 for Cuil. Bigger database? I’m not seeing it. Another rather interesting bit, Google lists itself on the first page of results for the term “search“, with 7,280,000,000 results. Cuil? They list Google’s Book Search (but not Google) as the third result for the same term, with only 2,079,002,318 results. And if you thought all that time you spent building pagerank would always secure you of that great SEO spot, you’re wrong with Cuil. While just about all other search engines are the same or very closely the same in terms of their results for terms, Cuil doesn’t seem to be so accurate. The term “Market Theme” in Google will return my site as the number one result. The same is true on Alta Vista, Yahoo!, and MSN. On Cuil? Market was no where to be found on the first five pages.

Everyone knows search databases improve over time. Google has had a ton of time to perfect things – so much so, that Cuil will never catch up, regardless of its database size. It’ll be interesting to see where this one takes us, that’s for sure.