Does Cuil just offer more to ignore?
By Chris Gaylord | 07.28.08
Google’s latest challenger stepped into the ring today, and it’s already throwing punches. Cuil, pronounced “cool,” spouted all weekend to reporters that its search engine rummages through 120 billion web pages – triple the number that Google indexes.
That’s a hard number to fact-check. Google stopped bragging about the size of its index three years ago. At last count it was 8.2 billion pages. Google wouldn’t release the current number, but insists that it’s still “the most comprehensive index of any search engine.”
Even if Cuil’s catalog is greater than them all, is it enough to lure users away from Google? In anticipation of Cuil’s debut, the official Google blog announced this Friday that it’s aware of 1 trillion unique web pages. But it only allows you to search maybe 4 percent of those – if you believe the industry estimate that Google indexes 40 billion pages.
Why so few? “Many of them are similar to each other, or represent auto-generated content … that isn’t very useful to searchers,” says Google’s Friday post.
I like imagining the Internet as an endless source of useful information; but, really, when I enter a search in Google, Yahoo, or Ask, I only look at the first few results. And I never go deeper than the top 50.
But there are hundreds, some times millions of other pages that I could have clicked on. Do I really need Cuil to triple the number of results that I ignore?
Cuil comes from a good pedigree, though. Several of its executives are Google alumni, and one of them, Anna Patterson, launched a search engine that “was so impressive that industry leader Google Inc. bought the technology in 2004 to upgrade its own system,” the AP writes.
Excitement about Cuil has attracted $33 million in venture funding. A good start to be sure. But Yahoo and Microsoft have spent hundreds of millions of dollars trying to bring down the search giant. It’s done little good.
Google delivers 62 percent of all US searches, up from about 40 percent in 2004. Yahoo gets 22 percent. Microsoft trails at 8.5 percent – and that’s after buying several of the more interesting search startups, including the natural-language based Powerset. Then there are the brave boutique engines: Viewzi, Vivisimo, Snap, Mahalo, Redzee, ManagedQ, etc.
Each site fiddles with aesthetics. Tweaks its catalog. Sprinkles in its own flavor. Meanwhile Google has succeeded by keeping things simple. Ms. Patterson also makes this point, but says it with a touch of scorn: “Google has looked pretty much the same for 10 years now, and I can guarantee it will look the same a year from now.”
I’m not convinced that looking the same is a bad thing. You know, if it ain’t broke….
But what does it take to make a better search engine? A larger index? Smaller? A different layout? What do you think, readers? What would your perfect search engine look like?
Also check out:
Update: Forget Jeeves, ask Powerset
Microsoft: We’ll pay you to search
Search engines with more sparkle
No more Micro-hoo
Comments
2. Steven Blinn | 07.28.08
Not sure what the news is, that former Google employees started a rival company or that Cuil indexes more pages.
Either way, you’re still going to have to click through a bunch of junk to find what you want.
BTW, there is free software available from Surf Canyon (http://www.surfcanyon) that makes search better and faster by re-ranking Google, Yahoo! and MSN on the fly.
How many times have you enter a search on Google or Cuil and get millions of results, there has to be something valuable beyond page one. Digging through all those pages, however, is too time-consuming, so few people do it.
Surf Canyon helps solve this problem. The technology observes your actions as you search, automatically figures out what it is that you want and then, on the fly, digs as deep as page 100 the search results and fetches it for you. It’s like a search engine for the search results.
Cheers,
Steven Blinn
BlinnPR
3. Adsense Income | 07.29.08
Of course the first thing I did is search on my important keywords for my own long-standing, relevant website. Horrors, my site is nowhere to be found. Even unknown sites that reprint my articles appear before me.
Now my site is unspammy, useful and real, so has no real reason to be banned or penalised by Cuil. Except for possibly the fact it uses Google’s Adsense for a major part of it’s revenue stream. But is also appears Adwords clients do well in the Cuils SERP’s.
So, question is - is Cuil penalising Adsense advertisers and rewarding Adwords publishers? I’m sure some former, possibly disgruntled Google employees wouldn’t want to help fill Google’s bulging coffers.
4. Dave Potts | 07.29.08
I appreciate the visual aspect of Cuil, but it seems to pair the same (often unrelated) images with search results. When you dig down to page 10 of your results, you realize that they’re showing you the same 8 or 9 images every time, paired with different content. Confusing.
5. Chris Gaylord | 07.29.08
@Dave: Yeah, some places call the Cuil layout “magazine-like.” I appreciate the effort to jazz up the page with images. But as you go deeper into the rabbit hole of results, the image selection gets curiouser and curiouser. If you guys are looking for a more graphical search engine, check out: redzee.com and managedq.com.
Viewzi.com offers tons of visual search options. But really, I keep returning to plain ol’ Google and Yahoo.
6. Sean Bires | 07.31.08
>> “But what does it take to make a better search engine?”
Google (the company) has a good sense of what works and how connect users with the information they want quickly without too much BS. A lot of Google’s competitors’ engines like to add back in the crap (”are you shopping for THESE PRODUCTS?” “Here’s a random cut-and-paste from wikipedia that may or may not have anything to do with your search!”) and use AI to better understand the meaning and context of the words you typed into the search box. The problem is that technology is seemingly not ready– I find myself trying to battle with the search engine’s incorrect assumptions about what I’m searching for. Google is less ‘high tech’ in that department but that’s what makes it easier to us — it’s more predictable as a tool, letting the user to shape the search a little better rather than trying to “trick” an overreaching AI.
I don’t think Google will be defeated until someone develops an AI that has a much deeper understanding of the web and language (enough to be more useful than Google), and deploys that technology long before Google is able to.
7. Dave Martin | 08.01.08
Time for new (good) search engines challenging Google.
See this one, though of narrow interest (scientists), it is becoming fast popular.
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1. Wendy | 07.28.08
When searching for words like ‘library’ ‘bookmark’ and other words with multiple and totally different meanings, my perfect search engine would let me specify which shade of meaning I am looking for. I’m not a software engineer but I think it would be fairly easy for a search engine to achieve this … If anyone wants to invest $33 million I’ll tell them how.
Another thing … when search results return umpteen million results, I’d be interested in seeing the umpteen millionth result. To reach that end result on Google, I’d have to tediously scroll through forever to get there … search engines should let you start reading results from midpoint in the search results if you want to (thus bypassing a lot of spam sites) or backwards from the end results or anywhere in the results you choose in any direction you want to go, backward or forward. I find first page results are often not what I’m looking for, the most interesting results are usually farther down. Search results used to be a lot more eclectic, today they are mostly blah.