Is Cuil Cool?

Written by Francis on July 28, 2008 – 2:50 pm -

There’s a new kid search engine on the block and it boasts the BIGGEST INDEX EVAH. It’s Cuil (pronounced “cool”) and it was designed by some of the engineers behind Google’s index.

Built with $33 million in venture capital from Greylock Partners, Madrone Capital Partners, and Tugboat Ventures, Cuil is made up of an all-star team of Web technology veterans. The husband and wife founders are Tom Costello, creator of Xift, and Anna Patterson, creator of Recall, a technology now used by Google. Rounding out the team are ex-Google engineers Russell Power and Louis Monier, also the ex-CTO of AltaVista. (Beta News)

But don’t call it Google killer just yet and definitely make sure you spell it C-U-I-L and not another way or you’ll get something that’s not safe for work - or anywhere (I’m not sure what culi means in Italian but I think that’s Dateline NBC knocking at my office door.)

Google felt it was worth a preemptive strike and even the big boys are talking about it today. So, like it or not, Cuil is launching with some street cred. From Danny Sullivan at SEL:

Cuil provides what appears to be a comprehensive index of the web, a unique display presentation and emerges at a time when people might be ready to embrace a quality “underdog” service. The big questions now are, how’s the relevancy hold up? And can word-of-mouth really still build significant share? (SEL)

Cuil reports an index that is “3 times the size of Google’s index” and also does a little trash talking about Google on their about page.

Rather than rely on superficial popularity metrics, Cuil searches for and ranks pages based on their content and relevance. When we find a page with your keywords, we stay on that page and analyze the rest of its content, its concepts, their inter-relationships and the page’s coherency.

Then we offer you helpful choices and suggestions until you find the page you want and that you know is out there. We believe that analyzing the Web rather than our users is a more useful approach, so we don’t collect data about you and your habits, lest we are tempted to peek. (Cuil)

OH NO YOU DINT! Google, meet the curb…

I’m just wondering if that last part about peeking is a wafer thinly veiled call-out by the former Google Engineers who now front Cuil. What’s a salty old SEO to think? Danny Sullivan (from the SEL article quoted above) goes on to describe how in the indexing world that bigger is not necessarily better, because of things like quality pages, and the way duplicate or infinite loop content (think calendar pages with “next page”). The bottom line is the question: What’s Cuil after? are they just another start-up looking for acquisition in 18 months by Yahoo, Microsoft or Ask? Are they a real rival to Google? (In which case, yes they will be acquired, sooner rather than later). Or are they just another well funded geek site that will fizzle to vapor because they have no real value add beyond plain vanilla search?

I’ve asked the top SEO playahs that I know to weigh in on Cuil. I’ll post their responses as they come in. As for what they think of culi.com, well you’ll have to read my other blog for that.

SEO EXPERTS WEIGH IN:

Cuil (pronounced “cool”) claims to have an index of over 120 billion pages (or three times more the amount of Google), but who really cares unless Cuil can do a better job than Google at sorting out the relevant information from the bad, and serving better results to its users. Having the capacity and technology to crawl more webpages definitely sounds promising but is it really enough to compete with Google?

This is sort of like me trading in my 12 year old Lexus with 150K miles (these babies run forever) for a shiney and exciting newly-invented teleport offering me millions of more destinations all over the world that my car probably couldn’t get to. Sounds pretty good on paper, but if this teleport offers very poor directions and randomly takes me to Tijuana when I am asking it to take me to Arkansas for a business meeting (well, maybe this isn’t such a bad thing in this case), then what’s the point? I’ll take my dependable old car back until the teleport can offer me greater results.

Cuil has come out swinging (and we definitely need more of it so I am rooting for this search engine), but until a search engine can offer results that compete with Google’s relevancy, which is something that Google does better than any search engine in the world today, I’d say you’d be a ”fuil” (pronounced “fool”) to depend on Cuil until then.

Frank Antonellis
Director, Search Engine Strategy
SEOBoston.com

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Cuil does seem pretty random at this point. Of any recent start-ups, they should’ve been the first ones to tag themselves “beta.” But with some refinement, they could become an interesting player.

Here’s what I’m seeing so far:

- The layout has implications for paid search if they start populating it with ads. The multi-column layout, combined with sample photos, makes users look at the entire page, not just the so-called “golden triangle” (insert Beavis/Butthead chuckle here.) If they deploy ads into this layout, it could lead to some high CTRs.

- The sound bytes and image samples in Cuil are pulled from off-site sources, and are pretty random at this point. No idea what the ultimate value of this function would be, although one advantage for Flash sites is that the system will find a photo somewhere else if it can’t find one on your pages.

- Run searches with more than 2-3 keywords, and you’ll get a sample of Cuil’s larger “better” database - they’re actually indexing spam-filled “scraper” sites that Google ejected long ago. Could be useful though: you could use Cuil as a detector for copyright infringement. I found a couple copies of one of my blogs that I didn’t know existed.

-ss

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It makes you wonder if the former engineers fast-tracked the building of Cuil after Google gobbled up DoubleClick and asked certain employees “Did you sign the non-compete” —“great, you’re fired”. That tends to put a strain on the “Don’t be Evil campaign”.

So what makes cuil so cool?

1. Voracious indexing - over 121 billion pages indexed and Cuil is not stopping until entire web is indexed.

2. Richer Web 2.0 type display results with associated imagery and social features.

3. Cuil presents searchers with content-based results, not just popular ones

4. A nice ajax search box that finishes search terms as you type.

So is the Cuil algorithm superior to Google when it comes to indexing the monsterous web? I may be premature in saying this but…No. I am not formally schooled in search tactics such as relevancy and search architecture but I can determine a good search result when I see one. Let’s take a look between Cuil and Google for the search term “startup addict”
(yes, I’m vain, like the rest of the world). (read the rest at Startup Addict)

–Startup Addict

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