Bits: Cuil’s New Search Engine: Cheaper Than Google, but Not Better

In the vast majority of news concerning Google and its numerous competitors (aka Google Killers) as to who has the potential to win the search war, only one other search engine deserves some attention. It is called Cuil (pronounced Cool) and was founded by former Googlers. Check it out. According to some experts including Danny Sullivan from Search Engine Land, Cuil has the potential to compete, but more so Microsoft than Google and has yet to create a dent in the search market. Here is the article from the NY times called Cuil’s New Search Engine: Cheaper Than Google, but Not Better. Now, please try it out and let me know your thoughts and if you think Cuil has the quality required t motivate Google users to switch.

Here are some excerpts from the article:

SAN FRANCISCO—In her two years at Google, Anna Patterson helped design and build some of the pillars of the company’s search engine, including its large index of Web pages and some of the formulas it uses for ranking search results. Now, along with her husband, Tom Costello, and a few other Google alumni, she is trying to upstage her former employer. 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. The makers of the Cuil search engine say it should provide better results and show them in a more attractive manner.

“I think it will be better,” Mr. Costello said in an interview. “But there is no question that the public has to decide.”

Cuil, pronounced “cool,” is only the latest in a long string of start-up companies that have been founded and financed with the goal of competing with Google, as well as Yahoo and Microsoft. (In June, Google accounted for 61.5 percent of search queries in the United States, while Yahoo held 20.9 percent and Microsoft had 9.2 percent, according to comScore.) Some of the most prominent include Powerset, which Microsoft recently bought, and Wikia, which was founded by Jimmy Wales, one of the creators of Wikipedia. So far, none have managed to make a dent in the search market.

But some analysts say Cuil has potential, in part because of the pedigree of its founders.

“This is the most promising thing I’ve seen in a while,” said Danny Sullivan, who has followed the online search business for more than a decade and is the editor of Search Engine Land. “Whether they are going to threaten Microsoft, much less Google, that’s another story.”

Mr. Costello, a former researcher at Stanford, said that with 120 billion Web pages, Cuil’s search index is larger than any other. The company uses a form of data mining to group Web pages by content, which makes the search engine more efficient, he said. Instead of showing results as short snippets of text and images with links, it displays longer entries and uses more pictures. It also provides tools to help users further refine their queries.

Google would not comment on Cuil and would not disclose the size of its own index. But in an e-mail statement, Google said that it maintained “the largest collection of documents searchable on the Web” and welcomed competition.

Mr. Sullivan said he was unimpressed by Cuil’s claim that its index includes more Web pages, noting that could mean users are “overwhelmed by a whole bunch of junk.” But he said that Cuil’s new approach to ranking pages and presenting results could prove to be a hit with some users.

“If it turns out that they have good relevancy, I could see that the word of mouth” would bring Cuil some popularity, he said.

Ms. Patterson left Google in 2006 to found Cuil. The new company has other prominent ex-Google employees, including Russell Power, who worked with Ms. Patterson on the large Google index, and Louis Monier, a former chief technology officer at AltaVista, a pioneering search engine. Cuil, which has about 30 employees and is in Menlo Park, Calif., has raised $33 million from venture investors.

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Comments

1. Here is some more on Cuil:

   Cuil Stumbles on Launch, but Beats Google in Key Relevancy Metric

   Net Applications Global Internet Usage Market Share shows Cuil (pronounced cool) making an early impact versus Google in a key relevancy metric. Cuil is a new search engine created by former Google engineers (http://www.cuil.com). It was released to the public on 7/28. Net Applications has usage share numbers starting the next day. Cuil was able to reach .26% share on the first day we started tracking. However, there have been widespread reports of outages and problems with its search results.

   Even with the initial problems, Cuil was able to beat Google in a key metric that measures relevancy of search results, which is the amount of time a user spends on a site after being referred by a search engine. Here are the results for the last three days of July:

   Search Engine Avg. Minutes on Site
   Cuil 9.65
   Google 9.37
   Yahoo 8.57

   One of the new features with HitsLink 6.0 is the ability to track several key relevance metrics by campaign.

   For these and other Global Market Share Statistics, go to marketshare.hitslink.com.

   Posted by Alexandre Brabant on 08/06 at 08:53 AM

2. hi Alex,
   We sell trade show displays via the internet, so how we rank on search engines for the term ”trade show displays” is critical. I searched on Cuil the day after it went live for “trade show displays” and got the message “no results”. I was not impressed. But now based on your post, I tried Cuil again and this time we rank #6 for “trade show displays”. Not bad. More importantly, if you check, they include a picture with each listing, and we are the ONLY company listed with a picture of an ACTUAL trade show display! The other listing have the companies’ logos or other things. I LIKE that Cuil includes the picture. Very cool. I will be interested to see how they do. Now if they could just bump us up a couple of spots! ~ Steve

   Posted by trade show displays on 08/06 at 10:16 AM

3. Awesome. Glad to hear this. When you post your link in blog post comments, make sure you put link title text in your links. Here is an example:

   This is the visible text to the link back to your site with the words Trade Show Displays in the link text

   Posted by Alexandre Brabant on 08/06 at 10:57 AM

4. Hi Alex,
   Thanks for the suggestion on including the title attribute in a hyperlink. I will do that in the future. Do you think it makes much of a difference? I know that every little bit helps, but do you have any insight on how much it helps? ~ Steve, aka “Mr Trade Show Displays”

   Posted by trade show displays on 08/06 at 11:03 AM

5. it helps a lot! From experience, I think it is just as important as the page title, which has always been the most critical piece of text.

   Posted by Alexandre Brabant on 08/06 at 01:44 PM

6. hi Alex, I consider the page title to the Holy Grail of ranking factors, so if a link title is anything near that, it would be very important indeed. I’ll start using them! Thanks for the tip! ~ Steve, aka “Mr Trade Show Displays”

   Posted by trade show display on 08/06 at 02:13 PM

7. cuil is nice search engine but around 75 % peoples preferred google only...google dominates all other search engines..

   Posted by Unmetered VPS on 08/01 at 12:31 AM