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New Search Engine Cuil Takes Aim At Google
theodp writes "CNET reports that Cuil (pronounced 'Cool'), a startup founded by the husband-and-wife team of Xift creator Tom Costello and former Google search architect Anna Patterson, is launching a new search engine today that claims to index three times as many Web pages as Google." Running a few searches left me underwhelmed with the content of the results (hitting the next-page button on a search with a listed 62,200,000 results — for "seattle" — got me the unexpected error message "We didn't find any results for 'seattle.'"), but pleased with the actual layout of the results when it worked, so I hope the kinks are worked out. Update 7/28 18:30 GMT by SM: corrected Tom Costello's accreditation, he wasn't a professor at Stanford as the linked story suggests, just did some research there as a grad student. Thanks to the Stanford CS department for pointing this out.
A few observations:
* "Cuil" is a really dumb name. "Google" is a dumb name too, but at least its pronounciation is obvious to anyone reading the name. Can't say the same for "Cuil".
* It's unlikely that this new search engine even approaches Google in its comprehensiveness, or ever will
* Cuil has some weird bugs. I searched for my name, found a link to a Gallery page I have about my son's birth earlier this year, and they have a little thumbnail icon next to the search result for that. But it's a random map of the United States completely unrelated to the page it links to. Bizarre.
* Cuil's results come back more slowly than Google's (but this is from New Zealand, maybe it's faster from the USA), and their page re-renders in odd ways (at least on my oldish Firefox install) as results come in.
* Cuil seems to give the most favor to any page that has the word "is" after the search term. Invariably, the first result for almost any single word search will be whatever page starts out with "[Search Term] is ...".
* Google is really bad for Silicon Valley. So many good software developers in SV got sucked in by Google. Too much of the top talent in the area is now working for Google, doing almost completely useless stuff, and it's not healthy for the industry. Is there any software company in the bay area that hasn't had at least a couple of engineers sucked away by Google? Are algorithms for pushing targeted ads and useless web applications that never get out of beta really worth depleting the industry of so many of its best? I predict that when Google comes crashing down (and it will - anyone who has seen the ridiculous excess of the Google campus cannot help but realize this), the net result will have been to set back innovation in the software industry a great deal, by tying up so many people who would otherwise have done something useful.
* For the above reason, I wish Cuil all the success possible, because I'd love to see some actual competition in the search engine world.
Anyway that's how I see it.
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