Cuil for searching?
April 28th, 2008 by Mickey Panayiotakis
Google Antimatter?
Summer 2008: in a planet called Earth, which we seem to inhabit for now, a new power seems to have taken over. A once-little search engine has rose to dominate our specie’s most vital method of communication: the Internet. No one dares compete with them. Erstwhile monoliths are courting this new entity like timid schoolgirls, and bright new start-up dream of being assimilated into this new power’s all-encompassing aura. You and I have already been assimilated. Resistance is futile. [This space for lease for your own cliché.] In case you haven’t guessed it yet, it’s Google of course. The Mater of the Search.
So, in the peak of Google’s success and popularity, in the world where we “google” things before we search for them, where Gooogle is a subject, verb, object, and all other parts of speach, what’s a mom-and-pop startup to do?
Enter Cuil, stage left. Now, I’m not sure whether their owners have any kids, but for those to whom it matters Cuil’s owners are married. (To each other). They decided to do what us normal google-fearing won’t dare do: Start a new search engine. And the Internet is abuzz.
Unlike Google (and, for both of you who don’t use google, pretty much every search engine out there) Cuild does not rely on link popularity to rank search results. Instead, results are ranked based on content relevancy: You’re searching for “blue” and a page talks a lot about “blue”? Good match. No matter how popular or unpopular it is. Groundbreaking! Innovative! Oh wait…isn’t that what we used
do to, before Google came and rocked our world? Well, admittedly we should have better analysis tools today, so who knows. It may work. Let’s take it for a spin.
Cuil People
Ernesto on Cuil.com
I got this link from Ernesto, so I figured I’d search for him. As you can see below, I found some blog posts mentioning him.
The first thing I noticed is a different look. No longer a list of links…now I get three columns with descriptive text for every link and sometimes an image (but more on that later). Still about 10 results per page, though
Oh look, and there are pictures. How neat. But wait a minute…none of these pictures are Ernesto. And I see a lot of replies he left on blogs, but where’s his personal site? his Linked IN page? The same search on Google shows this blog as the second link and Ernesto’s Bigsight.org and Linkedin.com pages are next.
me on cuil
Next I decided to search for my narcissistic self. Better luck there: My LinkedIn profile and BigSight.org profile are both right on top. But wait! who’s that man looking back at me? I hope I don’t look that old, and I certainly never had so professional a photo taken of me. And if Cuil can look in the future and tell me that’s me in 15 years, then, well, you tell me what you think. Some other information about me that also shows up on Google shows up here, as does some pages that I don’t see on Google.
So I said to myself, then: “Self,” I said, “when you’re searching for Ernesto or yourself, what are you really searching for?” I thought and thought about that and decided if someone was searching for a person, they were trying to find background information and contact information. I guess both Cuil and Google succeed in that, in different ways.
cuil on cuil
I decided to get a little recursive with all this introspection and search Cuil for Cuil. Guess what? I didn’t find Cuil. I found instead French cuisine links, links about towns and villages of sligo, information about the Scottish glens. But no search engines. I also searched for “web search engines” and again I didn’t find cuil. But I did find links that reference searching the web, which of course make sense since Cuil searches the content, stupid.
Real Cuil Search
Enough abstract searching. Earlier in the day I was honestly searching on Google for an outdoor WiFi extender product I remember looking at a while back. Google had let me down, so I gave Cuil a go. At first I was disappointed: old news stories, blog posts, and reviews. When I started reading the excerpts however, the word I was looking for came up in-text: 12 times on the first page, 11 times on the second, didn’t count on the third: Meraki. Now, does this mean that Cuil was successful? On one hand, it didn’t point me to the Meraki site; on the other, I was able to find it on Cuil whereas on Google Meraki does not show up at all on the first 3 page (I didn’t go further), except as a sponsored ad. (I should have read those I guess).
Cuil’s approach vs. Google’s
Cuil’s text-analysis analysis approach seems to favor wordy sites: blogs, news, technical dissertations. In theory, this would also work well for less popular subjects whose keywords are similar to more popular ones. But why did Meraki not show up? Meraki’s website focuses more on Internet connectivity than extending your wifi signal. Their Solution is not to the problem of extending WiFi signal but rather to the problem of getting Internet to the vast number of people who aren’t connected. OK, good theory but if I search for “get the people connected through WiFI” or other meraki-tailored searches, Cuil tells me “No results because of high load”. Getting past that, I still don’t get Meraki. I also noticed that Meraki’s site is heavy on Flash. Could it be that Cuil does not index Flash files (a known problem with search engine optimization)? I searched for something else I searched earlier: “Transmission steering”. This also got me the “high load” error. Good to see the word about Cuil is getting out.
Google on the other hand does solely rank pages based on their use of keywords…rather, based on the popularity and relevancy of links to these pages: If you write about topic X and link to site Y, site Y gets more points. With this strategy, popular sites get higher rankings, which works most of the time. However if you’re searching on an esoteric subjects (transmission steering, anyone?), you get a lot of car links and transmission links and steering links and even break links…but finding transmission steering links is an exercise in patience if not outright sisyphian. A few days ago I was searching for a solution to a compatibility problem between two pieces of hardware: I instead found a lot of links to reviewers and sellers of said hardware.
Summary
Well, it seems Cuil’s servers are down for searches that are not cached, or so it appears. This means I can’t test my theory on searching for esoteric subjects on Cuil. But I’ll keep working on it for the next few days and report back. In the meantime, comment with your experiences on Cuil so we can find out where it works, where it fails, and what we can use it for. Competition is good, and someone challenging Google can’t hurt.