10 Comments

Cuil is Cool, But Google Killer It Ain’t

July 28, 2008 by in Random with 10 Comments

Lurking in California is a bunch of Ex-Google Engineers that are hell bent on unseating the unstoppable juggernaut of search – Google.

The companies name: Cuil (Pronounced “Cool”)

Cuil launched today with a index of 120 billion web pages (compared to Google’s 1 Trillion) making them a formidable competitor out of the gate. This is the brain child of the husband and wife super team Tom Costello and Anna Patterson who, while at Google, were responsible for much of the way the search engine functions today.

Patterson and Costello’s impressive feat is that they’ve done this with a total of 1,400 eight-CPU computers (1,000 find and data-mine Web pages, the remaining 400 serve up those pages), while the big search services have warehouses of servers numbering in the many thousands.

Cuil attempts to see relationships between words and to group related pages in a single server. Patterson says this enables quicker, more efficient searching: “While most queries [at competitors] go out to thousands of servers looking for an answer, 90% of our queries go to just one machine.”

Patterson and Costello believe this yields more insightful results. “We aren’t a popularity contest,” says Costello, knocking Google’s well-known “PageRank” method, which counts not just relevance of a page but the number of other sites linking to it. [via]

Despite all the hype, I found the engine to be quite inaccurate and irrelevant. Anybody care to share their experiences?

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  • Paul B

    Cuil will pull results from 120 billion Web pages, which is, it claims, roughly three times the reach of Google, Yahoo! or Microsoft

    is your 1 trillion a typo or is forbes wrong?

  • Chowder

    @Paul…it’s suppose to be 120 trillion…yes…Forbes is wrong…just go to Cuil’s website and you can see the number of current listings.

  • Chowder

    Let me correct myself…Dan is correct…and Forbes is still wrong or Cuil is bumping up their numbers. According to many websites, including Google’s Blog, Google just reached 1 trillion pages indexed. But, they don’t say how many pages are unique sites indexed. http://www.imoka.net/2008/07/1-trillion-pages-indexed-by-google.html

    Either way, it will be nice to see some competition for Google. It will make both companies push each other harder and we all are the benefactors.

  • Kevin

    I like the page numbers being persistent at the bottom of browser. The results it returned for my employer were all highly relevant.

    But page loads can be really slow. And I have gotten a “we’re busy try again later” message. That is not cool.

  • http://www.seanmcauliffe.com Sean McAuliffe

    I got one, a “Can’t show you results due to high volume” message, but only once out of like 10 failed attempts. Seems like it’s getting hit pretty hard right now.

  • Adam

    I also found the page to load very slow. Also, I looked up my company and noticed a link to a different company with a similar name, however the image next to the link was for my company. That is definitely a inconsistency that will need to be cleaned up.

  • Paul B

    Ok, I assumed forbes was wrong, and it was just a copy/paste from them :)

    @ Kevin: you mean thats not Cuil lol

  • chad

    I’ll vouch for it… if searching for myself if found High School track records and standings from 1999-2002, also found some groups I belong to. However the data retrieved from Google was nearly identical… except from different sources which I find really weird… for example.

    Google found 400 dash times and places for State Level competition 2001
    Cuil found Long Jump results from some Regional meet from like 2000

    Both found the right DIgg account but only Cuil found livevideo … kinda weird.

  • David

    I’m very happy to see someone going against Google, but these nerds couldn’t come up with a better name? Cuil-pronounced-cool is not going to be a winner. I suggest they come up with something poignant very rapidly, and change it before they get known to the general public…

  • Zack

    I don’t like its habit of putting up random pictures it assumes are connected with the search. When I searched “japan”, for instance, I got pictures of everything from a Caucasian woman to what looks a bit like a disembodied hand. And searching for “United States” oddly enough doesn’t bring up an American flag but an assortment of agency logos.

    It also appears to be a terrible research search engine at first glance. Just as a test search, “president of the USA” nets a White House site and a Wikipedia article on Google, but everything from Asian Americans to Girl Scouts on Cuil.

    Google-killer it ain’t. Unless I’m doing something wrong.

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