Cuil-the hot new search engine of 1997 Ander Murane

Google’s latest rival appeared yesterday to great hype and fanfare. Cuil.com was founded by a handful of former Google heavyweights who are getting everyone worked up at the possibility of a “next Google”.

But instead of a roar, Cuil.com got off with something more like a FFFRRRAAPFT! (although any one of Don Martin’s sound effects would apply).

Cuil (pronounced “cool”) dismisses Google’s search methodology as nothing more than a “superficial popularity metric”. They also claim to have an index three times larger than Google’s. Search 121,617,892,992 Web pages, boasts the homepage – a number that hasn’t changed a day later. They also claim that their mission is to index the entire Internet, not just bits and pieces.

Starting with the name, there are a lot of red flags in the previous paragraph.

Cuil instantly catapults them onto a short list of worst brand names on the web. What’s the over/under on the number of times their marketing staff has to recite “rhymes with cool” before thoughts of suicide start creeping in? Is it really cool, or does it just rhyme with it?

And making the claim that they search all of the web implies they’ve broken through the invisible/deep web barrier (e.g. being able to spider private sites, unlinked pages, dynamically generated content etc…). They haven’t. There’s a lot of splutter and spit in these claims, but not much else.

Finally, claiming that their index is three times bigger than Google’s is meaningless when search results are this irrelevant (more on this shortly). As Danny Sullivan points out, Google had a very small index when they started but it was the quality of their results that crushed the competition.

But let’s get to the actual search results. A search for Cuil launch on cuil.com yielded nothing about the company’s launch. I scaled back the search and typed in cuil. Again, no mention of the company, let alone the launch. Not a promising start when a search engine can’t index or optimize itself. Looks like our fears of “self aware” computers stoked by the Terminator were probably unwarranted.

Next I typed in Brett Favre, thinking there was no way they’d miss the biggest sports story in the country. There was not single mention of the NFL quarterback’s ongoing drama until the bottom of the third results page where it stumbled across a news aggregator.

This appears a full results page after a spam site selling Vicodin with brett favre appearing repeatedly in the text. They clearly have their work cut out for them on the spamdexing front.

Not believing my eyes, I started scouring for a news option, thinking I could at the very least look through their news feeds. Like many people, I have become accustomed to news feeds on search engines. Turns out they don’t do news, or images for that matter. Another major problem is redundancy – I saw the same search results on as many as four pages.

This brings us to a core problem with Cuil.com. The site was founded on the principle that search engines shouldn’t act like a popularity contest. With Google, links from more popular sites carry more weight in determining search rank for the pages these sites are linking too. Cuil is shooting for relevance of content – it doesn’t matter who is linking to a page – it’s the actual content that determines relevance. The problem is that it doesn’t work.

This kind of feels like we’re stepping into a time machine when dinosaurs like Excite and Alta Vista ruled the earth. You have to admit that most search engines prior to Google were pretty limited, if not terrible. This emphasis on site content will probably set Cuil up for being gamed by SEOs and black hatters who will figure out how to optimize their sites without having to worry about quality links.

In spite of all the gripes people have about PageRank and Google’s search methodology, it still works better than most. It’s too bad more innovative competitors, like Vivisimo’s Clusty doesn’t get the same kind of hype Cuil is enjoying. Degrees from Carnegie Mellon are clearly not as sexy as having former Google employees on your payroll.

Let’s hope Cuil can chalk these problems up to growing pains and a clumsy launch. I think everyone is pulling for an underdog, but for now, Cuil is nothing more than your average bear, at best.

• 4 Comments
• Posted In Media