Yesterday Cuil, a brand new search engine, launched and boy did bloggers notice. Look at any tech blog and you’ll find an opinion of cuil. Either it’s a google killer or a failure.
Regardless of the fact that cuil is a day old, the comparisons to google are widespread, and it’s hard to write an article without doing the cuil vs. google dance. Why? Because cuil is begging people to make that comparison. Here’s how:
The People- Cuil is staffed by ex-googlers, all with search backgrounds. And when a bunch of ex-google folks get together and launch a company based on search, well, you compare them to google.
The Size- Cuil’s press release is entitled “Cuil Launches Biggest Search Engine on the Web” and they have claimed to have “indexed 120 billion Web pages,three times more than any other search engine.” By “any other search engine”, they mean google. Let’s be honest: Google is the only other horse in the race.
Privacy Concerns- Cuil announced that they do not collect any personally identifiable information and they do not keep users’ IP addresses. That statement is a thinly veiled shot at Google’s recent privacy troubles.
The Design- In stark contrast to google’s all white home page, cuil’s home is all-black. Sure, this is pretty much meaningless, but it’s not a coincidence.
Well, How Does It Compare?
I guess it all depends who you ask.
A survey of the top tech blogs seems to show a consensus that it’s certainly interesting, but not as good as google in the most basic use: search relevance. Sure, cuil may have a cool design, they may offer different navigation options and some semantic coolness under the hood- all of that is great. But if a company is to compete with the mighty google, those features are all but worthless if they cannot perform better in the single most basic search engine function: finding and presenting the best results for a query.
The other big question here is: how do you convince people to leave google and use your new shiny search engine (minus many of the features google has been giving away for years)? Google’s biggest asset is in its ubiquity: it’s EVERYWHERE, and everyone uses it all the time. If any search engine is going to compete with google, they’ll have to be better by an order of magnitude. It can’t just be a little bit better. And for now, cuil isn’t in the same league.
But hey, it’s day two and I remember thinking “why would I ever need another search engine when AltaVista is so good?” I could very well look back and laugh when I think back to using google all the time. It happens.
