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.

Comments

"62,200,000 is meaningless"

[Anonymous Coward]

The number of search results does not mean anything, relevance is what is important - if what I want is not in the first 5 pages of search results I assume it doesn't exist (and I expect to find what I want on the first page 95% of the time).

Re:"62,200,000 is meaningless"

[Shihar]

Cuil's claim to fame is that it indexes more pages than Google, not that it will give you more hits (though you would think that it would). That said, you are right in that it doesn't matter. So what if it is indexing 3x more pages. Are those pages worth indexing? I am really skeptical that a page that Google doesn't index for whatever reason is the page I am after when I search something.

There are only two things that matter when it comes to what happens after you hit the search button, the interface and the results in the first 1-5 pages. The rest is junk. Telling me that I got three trillion hits is like my computer reporting that it took seven billion calculations to open a program. Great. That is a fun fact, but I don't give a shit.

If you want to beat Google, you need something new. Natural language searches, search engines that act as agents continuously looking for things for you, whatever. Doing what Google does but supposedly slightly better just isn't enough. Google already does it good enough for most people. If you want to beat Google, you need to do something innovative that Google doesn't do... and then rest the temptation to not take the dump truck of money they offer you should they recognize you as competition worthy of being bought out.

Page Count Poor Metric To Compare Sites By?

[rsmith-mac]

Is it me, or does page count seem like a poor metric to compare search engines by? Somehow I don't think Google is failing to notice 2 trillion pages, so either the numbers are off or Cuil is somehow spidering a lot of redundant pages. In either case I would find it hard to believe that there would be something on Cuil that's not on Google unless it's brand-new or spam.

The best for them

[4D6963]

The best they can hope for anyways would be to be bought by Google. Either that or they'll stagnate due to scalability issues or even suffer a slow death.

Besides, "Search 121,617,892,992 web pages" and none from my website? Allow me to remain sceptical..

Re:Tried it

[chalkyj]

It may be a cool touch, but they appear to be using a rather rubbish algorithm to pick them. My search for "slashdot" returned an image of the Beijing Olympics next to the result for this site.

Oh, and now all I get is "Due to overwhelming interest, our Cuil servers are running a bit hot right now. The search engine is momentarily unavailable as we add more capacity."

Slashdotted. That'll teach them to try to compete with Google, I guess :)

Nonsense

[sd.fhasldff]

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)

It's unlikely that this new search engine even approaches Google in its comprehensiveness, or ever will

What mechanism will bring about this Google crash? Unlike the famous companies in the .com bubble, Google is actually making money. And lots of it. More than a billion dollars a quarter, to go along with their $12 billion in cash and zero debt.

This is not to say that Google will remain eternally dominant, of course not, but the rules of the game favor the incumbent, especially in a lobbyist economy.

You say Google will come crashing down, yet you also say no one will "ever" be as good in search. So I ask again, what mechanism or event do you foresee in your crystal ball to bring about such an unlikely crash?

Re:Nonsense

[Bryan Ischo]

Well that is a good question. I agree that my statements do seem contradictory. What I think is that the online ad business is going to end up as another bubble; companies are going to wise up and realize that the money they pay for ads on web sites like Google's are not worth nearly as much as they thought, and the trend will be to a large reduction in money spent on ads. And Google will feel a big crunch because of this, and because they've spent so much money on so many frivolous enterprises, and fostered such a lacsidasical corporate culture, they will simply not be able to produce any new products or online services with the capability of recovering their previous levels of revenue. Eventually, they will become marginalized and irrelevant.

My choice of phrase - "crashing down" - is admittedly poor, since this is something that I don't think will happen all at once, but will occur over a period of time, 5 - 8 years or so.

Give it a chance to develop

[Mick Malkemus]

Google has been around for years.

Cuil has only just opened. Already, it is pretty decent.

I for one would love to have options to Google.

Re:Give it a chance to develop

[CastrTroy]

The hard part with searching the web isn't indexing millions of pages, or returning lots of results, it's returning the relevant results. This is what Google is good at, and it's the reason they were able to surpass Yahoo in the early days. I don't care if you return 17 billion search results, if none of them are relevant. I actually don't want millions of results. I want a few results with the most relevant shown first. If I don't see what I'm looking for in the first 1 or 2 pages, I try to refine my query, go to a different search engine, or look for another way to solve my problem.

Their spider is awful

[l-ascorbic]

The first time I encountered Cuil was when I blocked their "twiceler" spider from my site. It was hammering it with thousands of requests for non-existent pages. It seemed it was generating URLs at random. It then ignored the robots.txt for ages.

Failed already...

[cliffski]

these guys fell at the first fence. They have to include an explanation of how to pronounce their product name.
That's such a basic mistake it's laughable. If you want to build a global brand, starting with a name people can't remember or pronounce will not help.