Cuil Is Live - But Is It Relevant?
Cuil, the new search engine founded by former Googlers has finally launched.
Back on June 10th 2007 we wrote “Cuill - A New Search Engine From Ex Google and IBM Staff“. Well, Cuil has finally launched live and they make some pretty bold claims including having indexed more content than Google itself. I guess only time will tell.
If you’ve not checked it out I suggest you do www.cuil.com. It’s got a nice fresh interface for a change although I’m still not sure if I find it as useful. Searching for me is about accomplishing a task - not playing around with results. I use StumbleUpon for that.
What bugs me more is that I don’t think that Cuil has not quite figured out the relevancy part of search yet. I ran a few tests and for me the results were less than pleasing. For example a search on Google for my name in my opinion produces my profile pages from our company www.sparkinternetmarketing.com. The same search on Cuil does not - in fact you get a bunch of stuff about me from other sites, but not my own site or other sites I operate. The only time site comes up is for a blog posts I did here. That’s just my author name in that page vs. the anchor text off our home page and so on.
Here’s a screen cap of my search results…
I welcome the introduction of another search engine - but Cuil is not going to change my world yet. When I get better more relevant results from Google, Yahoo and yes, MSN - I won’t be switching anytime soon.
That being said - keep it up Cuil and continue rolling out algorithm updates to improve the relevancy! Add in the ability to provide search results feedback and you’ll be on your way to capturing some of that search market share!
July 29th, 2008 at 5:44 pm
I like the interface but I don’t like the search results so far… It does kind of feel like using stumbleupon. But, I think Cuil is off to a good start. It’s hard to get in an industry like that and try to blow the competition out of the water. It takes time.
July 30th, 2008 at 12:53 am
I agree with Monavie. The 2-3 column plus image interface is cool, but the results are crap. I searched for my own domain and it didn’t come up, but I can search it on google, yahoo, or msn and it is #1.
I think their greatest strength is also their biggest weakness. The founders are from Google so everyone rushed over to check it out. It’s great for hype. But it was impossible to live up to the hype which has led to thousands of negative blogs in the last few days.
As for the interface, Google should grab it and give it as an option in their labs.
August 1st, 2008 at 5:11 pm
Meh. I don’t like the interface. I hate black backgrounds for one thing, then the way the sites are listed is a bit awkward, especially if you are trying to get people coming over from Google.
August 3rd, 2008 at 5:54 pm
I like the interface the opening page has a really nice look but the search is limited and i hate the three column format they use one column would have been better and easier to read. I dont think they will have beat Google. Better luck next time guys.
August 4th, 2008 at 8:28 pm
Everything I searched for about myself or my sites came up with unrelated pictures.
August 5th, 2008 at 7:41 am
@Bob - Yeah, I found the same problem too. My picture is well indexed by google so I’m not sure how relevant the results are for Cuil yet. I think they have a chance here but they need to get the relevancy up really quick.
If they can only focus on one type of data I think they should drop the rest like images. Get the SERPs right first then start folding in more sources.
August 30th, 2008 at 8:36 am
Wel I am not a fan for my own selfish reasons - I rank badly in Cuil…
Interface is cool, I just think the search engine market is pretty wrapped up with the big 3 already - hard market to break.