Search Engine Tigers

Last night a new search engine launched – Cuil, pronounced Cool. Normally this wouldn’t make too much of a splash, but it’s backed by $33 million of VC money, and was founded by former Googlers. They claim to have built a better mousetrap, with more pages in their index than Google. So how does it stack up?

First things first, the home page is cleaner than that of Google’s (no specialized searches listed), and they seem to be going for the anti-Google label, with the background being black, while Google’s is white.  But what about the searches?  Naturally the first one that I did is a vanity search.  Time for it to run – 8 seconds the first time, 3 seconds the next.  Ok, so it’s not as fast as Google, but what about the results?

Rather than 10 results in a column surrounded by paid listings, Cuill has gone for 3 columns containing 11 results (4 each in the first 2 columns, and 3 in the last).  Each listing has a nice chunk of text associated with it, and an image where one can be found (not always that most contextually relevant image, but an image nonetheless).

Result quality?  Hmm, not so good.  For a search engine that claims to index more pages than Google, none of the blogs that I write on, on a regular basis are there (weekly or more frequently).  However, seosfightfat, a blog I was writing for a month earlier this year shows up in 11th, 15th, 17th, 18th, 21st, etc.  Not something that you’d see on Google, with no more than 2 results displaying for the same domain.

I’d seen some people tweet that spam was a big problem on Cuil, so I thought I’d do some further searches to check that out, to see exactly what the extent of that problem was… unfortunately Cuil is no longer working, due to the number of people hitting their service to try it out today, which in itself is not cool.

So, is Cuil the fabled Google killer?  Probably not.  It’s going to take a lot of cash and luck to get any sizable chunk of the search engine business, just ask ASK, and MSN, both of which have tried throwing money at that very same issue, to not succeed.

For more thoughts and opinion, check out the various discussions on the topic linked to by the Search Engine Roundtable article on Cuill.