Cuil: The bizarre new search engine that seems to be straight from 1998

A "new" search engine called Cuil (pronounced "cool") just launched today.  The company was founded by some ex-Google employees. See press coverage here and here.



I put the word "new" in quotes because Cuil doesn't feel new at all. Sure, there are a couple interesting innovations. But with Cuil, I feel like it's 1998 all over again. Here's why:

• Relevancy is horrible. Perhaps I should cut them some slack because it's only the search engine's first day. But still, I was amazed how poor the results were on the searches I performed. For example, I searched on the word manufacturing.  (Click screenshot above for a full view of my results). About half the results on the first page were laughable. An RC plane company? Ping golf? Perhaps the word "manufacturing" appears in their title tag or somewhere on these sites' home pages, but that's about it.  Compare Cuil's results to Google's or MSN's and you'll see the difference. It almost seemed as if Cuil crawled the web for pages that contained "manufacturing" and showed me a random sample of those pages. Wow.
  
  
  
  


• Cuil is making a big deal about how they're crawling more pages than Google -- they claim about 3x more. But who cares? This seems like the type of boast that search engines used to make a decade ago, when biggest was the best. I thought we were finally past the size wars, search engine community?
  
  
  
  Who cares how big your index is? If I needed to read millions of pages on manufacturing today, perhaps Cuil would be better than Google. But when I'm doing a search, I usually only need one or two pages -- the one or two most relevant pages. Comparing search engines based solely on size is like comparing electric motors based solely on their wattage, or comparing cereals by how many different vitamins and minerals they have. Having a super low number in any of these situations is probably a bad thing -- but bigger doesn't necessarily equate to better.
  
  
  
  


• They seem to have thrown out the concept of PageRank, one of the greatest innovations in search engine relevancy. That sounds like a giant jump backwards -- almost like Sony launching a brand new line of transistor radios. On Cuil's info page, they say, "Rather than rely on superficial popularity metrics, Cuil searches for and ranks pages based on their content and relevance. When we find a page with your keywords, we stay on that page and analyze the rest of its content, its concepts, their inter-relationships and the page’s coherency."
  
  
  
  Huh?
  
  
  
  I think they just said they're ignoring a tremendous body of knowledge. They're ignoring who links to who. Am I reading that correctly? Why would they do that? And how can you possibly build a more relevant search engine by ignoring linking data that makes up the fabric of the World Wide Web?
  
  
  
  


• Where are the ads? I assume Cuil is just launching the search engine itself now, and they'll be developing the ad model later. (Yes, that's how Google started...) But it's a decade after Google, and the search industry has grown up. It seems odd that you'd launch a new search engine without having your monetization strategy already built in, like GoTo did in 1998.

All that being said, I like some things about Cuil. I like the interface. The tiled search results are an interesting approach, especially with the graphics presented alongside the results. The "Explore by Category" box could be an interesting innovation. I could see an existing player adopting some of the architecture here.



At best -- and assuming Cuil improves its relevancy -- I could see it hanging around for a year or two as a search alternative with 0.5% market share and a grassroots following. Then perhaps one of the big or medium-sized players would buy Cuil (even though in the MSNBC article linked above, Cuil's Anna Patterson claims it's not for sale).

When I saw the headlines about a new player in the search market, I was initially excited to see what the next Google-killer had up its sleeve.  But Cuil doesn't even deserve to be mentioned in the same sentence as Google or any of the other big players.