Cuil The Conquerer: No Way!
Cuil, a new search engine, touted to be the next Google killer, is nowhere close to the search giant. Check out how....
The new search engine Cuil, which was launched yesterday, has been touted as the next Google killer by many bloggers. But the ambitious effort by some of the former top Google search engineers seems to be no where close to that.
Cuil in its press release says, ''Cuil (pronounced COOL) provides organised 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 analyse the context of each page and the concepts behind each query. It then organises similar search results into groups and sorts them by category.''
Cuil gives users a richer display of results and offers organising features, such as tabs to clarify subjects, images to identify topics and search refining suggestions to help guide users to the results they seek.
Cuil also claims that it combines the biggest Web index with content-based relevance methods, results organised by ideas and complete user privacy. "Cuil (www.Cuil.com) has indexed 120 billion Web pages, three times more than any other search engine," it further adds.
Google seems to be already aware of the initiative. In its blog posted by Jesse Alpert and Nissan Hajaj, software engineers, Web Search Infrastructure Team, Google, it touches upon some points which Cuil boasts of. The blog says, ''We've known it for a long time: the Web is big. The first Google index in 1998 already had 26 million pages, and by 2000 the Google index reached the one billion mark. Over the last eight years, we've seen a lot of big numbers about how much content is really out there. Recently, even our search engineers stopped in awe about just how big the web is these days -- when our systems that process links on the web to find new content hit a milestone: 1 trillion (as in 1,000,000,000,000) unique URLs on the Web at once!''
And then it also seems to take a dig at Cuil by further stating, ''We don't index every one of those trillion pages -- many of them are similar to each other, or represent auto-generated content similar to the calendar example that isn't very useful to searchers. But we're proud to have the most comprehensive index of any search engine, and our goal always has been to index all the world's data.''
Let's not get into the verbal spat between David and Goliath -- more may follow. Having read enough of the claims made by both the companies, this is what we found when we did the basic 'testing'. Cuil may claim to scan more pages than Google, however, when we typed in 'Richard M Stallman', the legend behind free software movement, Cuil returned 19,002 results for 'richard m stallman', while Google came out with Results 1 - 10 of about 263,000 for 'richard m stallman' (0.37 seconds) . This gives an idea of how much comprehensive the search is as of now.
Now coming to the content, when we searched for EFYTimes on Cuil, all the results that we got were from some 'wireless security news', no pages from original EFYTimes.com. Whereas on Google, the first result was the home page of EFYTimes. So, this also raises a question on the relevance of search results.
Looking at these results, at least, I can't call Cuil anywhere closer to being a Google killer. It seems to be yet another kid on the block. However, it is a great effort and with time it may improve. And in the world where Microsoft and Yahoo! are struggling to inch towards Google's empire, a new player is welcome. But they need to work on the shortcomings (if these are as per them) mentioned above and include some revenue generation model as well to become commercially viable, unless they want to get acquired by some biggies like Microsoft.
-- Swapnil Bhartiya, assistant editor, EFYTimes.com
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