New search engine takes aim at Google By Rafe Needleman, Webware (Jul 27)
Sounds like the new search engine Cuil is serious about taking on Google, but it sure would be a tall order.
"The most important difference between Cuil and Google is its ranking system. Rather than assigning priority to pages based on inbound links as Google does ("Pagerank"), Cuil analyzes the content of Web pages to divine their relevance to a search query. Costello bristled when I asked if this was a semantic search engine like PowerSet (recently sold to Microsoft). Costello said Cuil's search is "contextual," and that, "we're trying to understand the real world, not the Web.""
I think they should have labelled this as beta because the engine is still quite rough.
Good points:
+ display in 3 colums is attractive
Bad points:
+ utah places - the first page of results are all from Oddpath, a commercial site for searching business and places
+ best places to visit in utah - no results - too many search terms
+ utah tourism - not bad but nothing special either. Also kicks out with an error message. Search engine is probably overloaded with people trying it out.
The review mentioned that Cuil will group results - but I don't see it.
And to top it all off, the Info page was a bad url.
Back to the drawing board.
Postscript: Danny Sullivan really went to town on Cuil (pronounce Cool - maybe it's welsh) in Cuil Launches -- Can This Search Start-Up Really Best Google?
Surely the answer is no.
+ notes Cuil's claim to a large database of 120 billion pages - but what about relevancy? Danny has a lot to say about size - it's a bugbear of his - and in this instance I don't see that size makes Cuil better than a smaller engine such as Ask.
+ link analysis and page rank vs pages related to the topic based on word analysis. "It [Cuil] figures out these relationships by seeing what type of words commonly appear across the entire set of pages it finds... Cuil then looks at the entire set to see which pages are linked to from them. Those with many or important links are likely to do better." Sounds like Teoma, says Danny.
+ three column display - explains that in the "top right corner" there are related search. Sure - for the test search Cuil advertises there is (test search is harry potter), but it doesn't show for my search - utah tourism - and this is not a complex topic.
There's more but Cuil doesn't do it for me. Search is very complex today - have to have the smarts to block out spam, be powerful enough to handle the scale, have enough language capabilities to handle meanings. I think semantic search such as Hakia offers has possibilites , and there may be other displays that will appeal more than Google's list - but if a creative team at Ask.com couldn't make significant inroads on Google's market share, can a new crew at Cuil?
Posted by Gwen at July 28, 2008 12:34 PM