Cuil (pronounced "cool"), a new search engine was opened to public today morning. This company has been founded by some ex-Google employees. Anna Paterson, her husband Tom Costello, who worked for IBM being at the helm of things.
Ms. Paterson and Mr. Costello have a history with search engines. They founded a search engine in 90s called Xift. Anna then wrote a search engine used for internet archives which was ultimately sold to Google. She was with Google with one of the product groups which is involved with rankings - one of the most important part of a search engine. Ms. Paterson has claimed that Cuil has searched 120 billion pages with only 140 servers, thanks to the new algorithm in place which was kind of designed by Tom. Cuil has raised $33 mn in all till date and has spent only $7 mn. Cuil has an index which is three times of Google's index as claimed by Ms. Paterson.
So, how does it fare in the game? Well, for me it was not great. OK, the presentation is new, which kind of appeals with a newspaper/magazine layout where you can read something about the link before actually opening it. And then there are pictures also along with those text snapshots from those web pages, which sometimes has nothing to do with the actual site! The search results are not that impressive. Maybe Cuil needs a bit of in-field work out before going for big claims. No matter how good you are your theories, you need to go in the field to have a feel of the real thing. I say that because, in the morning I was trying to search for "Web 2.0" as a test string on Cuil and all I was getting on the first page were companies who develop applications for Web 2.0. There was only one link, which was pointing me somewhere where I could have known about what the term means and that link was not under direct focus of the eye. That particular link was placed under the category's box! A place where your eye won't go in first look. I kept trying with the term till late afternoon and I was getting same sort of results. The same query string on Google, Yahoo returned me more meaningful links where I can learn about Web 2.0. Only a few hours ago, the result set changed on Cuil and now the first link there is Wikipedia article about Web 2.0 (which was not even present till 3 pages in the morning). The O'Reilly link which was present under Category box in the morning has also shifted towards left. Nevertheless, 80 percent of links on page 1 are more of commercial nature. Well, I hope the results will improve with days.
The Explore by Categories feature is a nice one which is kind of helpful with many search strings. But this is also giving an unrelated set of links for a lot of query strings. An example is, I searched for "New Delhi" and under Categories box, I get "Chief ministers of Jharkhand"!!
Nevertheless, a nice attempt and hopefully Cuil, if not merged with some search giant, can be a nice companion to Google but not a competitor in near future! Here's NY Time's article on Cuil.
Google did not commented on Cuil's launch (even after some of it's top ranking employees have started it) but they posted a blog on their official site which commented that Google always knew that web was big. They kind of thwarted Cuil's attempt to say that they have a larger index than Google by saying that there are infinite number of unique web pages and they don't know the exact number nor had the time to look for it as it all depends upon how you define what is a useful page. Their comment really impressed me. And after all, it's out there, you can go on and see for yourself.
