Too Cuil for school?
Sean Martin 11:37am
Web giant Google has a new rival this week, as the search engine Cuil was launched on Sunday night. The new service searches 120 billion web pages – 3 times as many as Google – and its central idea is to track down the most relevant content, rather than the most popular.
A good thing, surely? But after a couple of days using Cuil, I’m not yet sold on it. Its deep-search methods actually seem to dig up even more irrelevant content. An example: type in “Gordon Brown + recession” into both Google and Cuil. Google’s top 5 includes articles from The Times, Guardian and Telegraph websites. Cuil, on the other hand, directs you to internet discussion boards wikio.com and inform.com, and a page entirely in Welsh.
Cuil’s search results page is presented in columns combined with images – rather than a Google-style list – which makes it difficult to process the page’s copious information. And it neither alerts you to misspellings nor guarantees the elimination of explicit material; which, when it automatically provides images, is sure going to worry parents.
All of which makes it difficult to imagine Cuil breaking Google’s dominance. The jury may still be out, but the newcomer already has to search for some answers of its own…
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shirtbloke
July 29th, 2008 12:53pm Report this commentAlso you'll find that the images that appear alongside the results don't come from the featured websites - I've no idea where they get them from.
Cuil's got a long way to go yet.
Iain
July 29th, 2008 1:15pm Report this commentPerhaps I'm being thick but it doesn't seem to have any of the Advanced Search options available on Google, eg - Exact Phrase, Without The Word.
fulcanelli
July 29th, 2008 1:21pm Report this commentI tried it yesterday and the results it produced were less than helpful. For a literary search, where one would expect some academic sites etc, it returned nothing but shopping links and some author groups on the first page of results. The display is simply not intuitive, and feels overly cluttered. More is not always helpful, as the summaries are generally woeful.
A lot of work still needed, although we really do need a viable competitor to Google!
Richard
July 29th, 2008 1:29pm Report this commentI agree. Obviously it's brand new but the underlying technology seems flawed and the picture search seems like a daft idea. Also, putting the main page in black seems a bit too "we're not google" to be clever...
The Laughing Cavalier
July 29th, 2008 2:46pm Report this commentI have tested Cuil on a couple of subjects that I have researched before and found Cuil to be quite shallow. The images shown alongside search results often have nothing to do with that result. Explicit material can be and is exluded as one needs to turn off safe search for such material to be listed. "Oill give it five" (from ten), must try harder
The Wonderful Jones
July 29th, 2008 4:33pm Report this commentHeaven forbid there being a page in Welsh.
Max Kaye
July 29th, 2008 7:16pm Report this commentIt's awful. I do hope that the investors don't have any unrealistic expectations: like making a profit.
TBM
August 1st, 2008 10:35pm Report this commenti think were all very used to the way google searches, e.g we expect results to be like google's. we want cuil to search like google when in reality only google searches like google. Yahoo, Live search, ask etc all search differently thats why we dont use them as often and thats why google has risen above them even though they've been around for the same amount of time if not less. the moral of the story is to not try and beat google, if anything copy it and beat it at its own game. If you want an in-depth search, use search engines that search via all the big 5 search engines and gives you the results on 1 page such as Dogpile.
Ranking is often not the best way to judge a search engine as these can change every second and its become almost an economy in the internet world with companies paying to be higher up the rankings. Instead judge the quality of what you find rather than its position.
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