August 17, 2008
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The search engine called Cuil (pronounced cool) is not cool at all. The coolness is only in its name. It is not hot either. In one word, it is a disappointment, at least so far.
Cuil made its appearance to public on July 28. There was much hype in the press at the time of its launching. The reports said Cuil, headed by Tom Costello, Anna Patterson et al (former Google employees), is likely to beat Google and be the leader in search engine business soon. Cuil is advertised to have 120 billion Web pages in its index. Cuil itself says its mission is to index all, not some or most, of the Web pages that are out there. It boasts of its new and different kind of technology with which it will be possible for them to do so and do so economically.
As a Webmaster and regular user of search engines (mostly Google), I have a bad user experience with Cuil so far. The following are just some of my unfavorable experiences with Cuil:
1. When searching in Cuil using the same search words/phrases as I used in Google, I could not find at all the Web pages which appeared in Google’s first page of search results.
2. For a search term, Cuil often returns the same Web page(s) on consecutive pages of its search results, meaning it repeats the same info on different pages of search results. It is really irritating.
3. Cuil often puts a small picture next to a site’s name on its search results pages. Cuil claims that it finds a relevant picture from the site concerned and puts that in its results page(s). Not true. Often, a totally irrelevant picture is shown which does not even exist in that site.
4. If after trying several different keywords/keyphrases, and double checking spellings etc, you still cannot find the site you are looking for (and which you know exists, because Google can correctly point to it), Cuil gives you an option of reporting it to them via e-mail at noresults@cuil.com. I have already reported at least a half a dozen times of missing sites from their database since July 28. The sites are still not listed in Cuil’s search results!
5. Cuil says, “If you would like Cuil to crawl your site and have it included in our index, please let us know. Be sure to include the URL you’d like us to index in your email.” I have already contacted them several times about this since the time they came into business. I am sorry to say, I have had no luck so far.
6. New Web pages are being born everyday in big numbers. So one would expect that a search engine with a mission to index the whole Worldwide Web and not only a part of it, will have more and more Web pages listed in their index everyday. In other words, their index should have larger number of Web pages everyday. Right? Probably not. If I am not mistaken, I am seeing the same number below its search box from Day 1. It says, “Search 121,617,892,992 web pages”. This number is not increasing!
7. Another drawback of Cuil is no provision for exclusive “image search”. Google is way better in this department.
I don’t know what will happen in future. But for now, I am going to stick with Google. And I don’t think Google needs to worry much about the search engine Cuil created by defectors from their company. Cuil is not a threat to Google - at least it won’t be anytime soon.
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