ArsGeek

On Monday, July 28, 2008, a new search engine known as Cuil (pronounced “cool”) went online amidst a flurry of press coverage.  The expectations were understandably high.  Cuil is led by CEO Tom Costello, who has formerly developed search engines for Stanford and IBM.  Also on the team are his wife Anna Paterson (a former employee of internet giant Google), and two other former Google employees, Russel Power and Louis Monier.  Armed with the technical experience gained at Google and $33 million in venture capital, the Cuil team set the lofty goal of attempting to overthrow Google as the most popular search engine in the world.

Cuil claimes to index more web pages than any other service, at 120 billion web pages.  Google no longer reveals their exact index size, but representatives of Google remain confident that their index is significantly larger than Cuil’s.  Cuil also employs a much more context-based search than Google.  Search results appear in a distinct 3-column layout, with more content visible from each result and multiple thumbnail images visible immediately.

However, after a week of operation, Cuil is not quite living up to expectations.  While the search results are extensive, the most relevant results are not always the most readily available, nor does Cuil provide as many results as Google.  A search for “architecture” on both Cuil and Google provided 278 million results on Google, but only 63 million results on Cuil.  On most search engines, Wikipedia pages are one of the first few results for almost any topic listed in Wikipedia.  But Wikipedia articles rarely show up on even the first page of Cuil search results, even when you include “wikipedia” in the search terms.  In my “architecture” search, the very first result on Google was the Wikipedia page on architecture, with a sub-result for computer architecture.  On Cuil, I didn’t get any Wikipedia pages until the fourth page of results, and the article was on a vague branch of computer architecture.

Further marring the first-week results for Cuil was the poor context-matching in thumbnail results.  The images displayed along with search results often had little to do with the pages they were associated with.  For example, a French quantum researcher did a Cuil search for his own name, and was surprised to find that the thumbnails associated with articles on his research included a portrait of a US serviceman and a hardcore pornographic image.

Cuil’s lackluster results come as little surprise when you learn how they spent their venture capital.  Sarah Carey was hired by Cuil as a “Strategist to the CEO”.  After being flown from Ireland to Palo Alto, she discovered some less-than-frugal operating strategies.  The company ordered in lunch for every employee every day.  Large quantities of snacks – including strawberries and muffins scattered around the offices – are available to everyone.  And every executive was given a sports car.

In light of these investments, its not hard to see why Cuil has been stumbling since its release.  In time, Cuil might be able to pull itself together and give Google a run for its money.  But in the meantime, it looks like Google’s reputation for being the best search engine in the world is well-deserved and unthreatened.

Technorati Tags: cuil, google, search engine, internet

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