I dimly remember the days of search engine plurality. When you wanted to search the web, you had a number of choices: Yahoo!, Alta Vista, Northern Light, Lycos, Infoseek. If all of that was too much to think about, you could choose one of the meta-search engines like Dogpile that would pass your query on to a number of individual search engines. But at some point several years ago, most of us accepted the fact that Google, with its page ranking algorithm, was the best game in town. “To Google” became a verb and Google’s share of the search market probably topped Microsoft’s share in the browser market.
Every now and then, someone would question the Google gospel and try to promote a new search engine. Take Teoma, for instance. It popped up in 2000 and a few people were excited about it for a little while, but after the novelty wore off we all went back to Googling. Not only did Google have a great ranking algorithm, but the sheer volume of pages in its database was unsurpassed. Google has some issues with privacy, but who is really naïve enough to think that anything they do on the Internet is private?
Once again, a new contender has dared to raise its head. It’s called Cuil (apparently we’re supposed to pronounce that “cool”) and it launched yesterday. Cuil claims to search “more pages on the Web than anyone else.” The number they give today is 121,617,892,992. In addition, they are up front about their privacy policy, stating that they “analyze the web rather than our users.” So, they are claiming a larger database and the moral high ground (remember Google’s “don’t be evil”?).
Cuil’s interface is quite good. A page of Cuil results looks much more appealing than a page of Google results. Each result item displays with a blurb of about 40 words or so, as opposed to Google’s 10-15. This feature is useful in determining the relevance of a site. Cuil also features an image next to each result. This is decorative, but rarely informative. In fact, the images often seem to have been selected at random from the site. I did a search on “corn” and found that the entry for the Kentucky Corn Grower’s Association is adorned with an image of the Google logo, presumably because the page features a Google search box. A search for my place of employ, Ithaca College, turns up a picture of a horse and buggy. I can’t imagine where that came from.
Cuil offers an interesting feature called “explore by category,” similar to Google’s “related searches” feature. For the corn search, the “explore by category” menu offers a choice of “American cuisine,” “agricultural pest insects,” “crops,” “sweeteners,” and … wait for it … “UK MPs 1826-1830.” Huh? This feature does not always appear. A search on something fairly unambiguous (e.g., sea slug) will not show the “explore by category” box, but a term that can have multiple meanings (e.g., cook, java) will trigger the feature to appear.
In terms of search results, I am not especially impressed. On the corn search, one of the top hits was the Corn Island Storytelling Festival. The first page of Google results for the same search yielded only items actually relating to the crop. Generally, Cuil does not seem to share Google’s affinity for Wikipedia. Google searches very frequently feature this site high on the list, where in Cuil it seems to come up less often.
So, from what I’ve seen so far, I’m willing to give Cuil high marks for a good interface and kudos for their stand on privacy. As to search results, I’m going to keep playing with it. Only time will tell if this is the next big thing or if it destined to follow Alta Vista and Teoma into oblivion.