I read an article today on BBC about the launch of a new search engine by some former Google employees. The search engine is called Cuil (pronounced Cuil) and has a simplistic feel to it, reminiscent of when Google when it was first launched.
The site is different to Google in many ways. The site has a black background and search results are displayed within a frame. You can display results in 2 columns or in 3 and most results have a thumbnail image attached to it. You have the option of using ‘Safe Search’ and there is a typing suggestion tool too that you can use if you want. There is also a category box at the right hand side of results with some related tags to your search, a nice feature. Other than that though there’s not much else to Cuil, which is not a bad thing in my opinion.
I did notice that the images which are attached to results are all mixed up. For example, if you search for Blogging Tips you will see an image from Lorelle Van Fossen’s blog attached to BloggingTips.com and the old BloggingTips.com mascot attached to Lorelle’s listing. All the other images on the results page are mixed up too. Since Ciul is still really new this is forgivable and I’m sure they will fix this soon.
I would personally love to see more search engines stand up and challenge Google’s dominance and perhaps the time is right. Danny Sullivan from Search Engine Land agrees :
The time may be right for a challenger. Competing with Google is still a very daunting task, as Microsoft will tell you.
In the past week Google has annoyed a lot of webmasters with the release of their new article site Knol, a site which sees Google enter the content market, something which competes with the websites which are listed in their results and something which they have said many times in the past they will not do. I don’t know your view on the subject but personally I don’t think Google should be entering this market as it’s a conflict of interests. The purpose of any search engine is to produce relevant search results to the user and with many people already proving that articles on Knol are getting high rankings after just a few days, it’s clear that they are not unbiased when it comes to SERP’s.
So can Cuil succeed? Can they take some of the market from Google? Well, it’s certainly no easy task. It’s a different world today than when Google entered it 10 years or so ago. Google now has partnerships with thousands of ISP’s across the world and with many popular browsers so that it is the default search engine for most people, not to mention the brand name they now have. I really do hope a site like Cuil can get some sort of market share though. A monopoly is not good for any industry and with Google having more than 90% of search engine traffic I’d say that some healthy competition is well overdue.
If you’re interested in using a different search engine I recommend giving Cuil a try.
Link : Cuil
John Young | We Have Contact | July 28th, 2008 at 11:07 am #
It will be interesting to see how this new engine fares against the existing giants. My personal views of Google have changed a bit in the wake of Knol, so i’m not yet exactly sure how I feel about this.
Anything is worth a try once, though!
B. Durant | July 28th, 2008 at 12:33 pm #
It’s slow for one. The name isn’t very marketable. As stupid as Google sounded in the beginning it still had a ring to it. How do you submit your website to cuil? Don’t think you can.
I don’t think we can expect it to have everything under the sun, but the ability to submit sites for indexing seems a pretty basic ability that a search engine should have.
Kevin Muldoon (Post Author) | July 28th, 2008 at 12:42 pm #
B - Actually it was much quicker this morning. It has slowed down a lot in the last few hours. There has been a lot of people posting about this site and it seems like they can’t handle the traffic, obviously they didn’t expect so much traffic on the one day.
You’re right about the name though, whilst cuil is a 4 character domain, it’s certainly not as easy to remember as google.
Stephan Miller | July 28th, 2008 at 2:14 pm #
I keep waiting for the search engine that will give Google a run for the money. They have their hands in too many things to provide fair results. I remember that Yahoo Answer’s pages get high ranking in Yahoo. I wonder if it will be the same with Knol. After all, Google can give them a PR10 link.
Andrew. Fredericksburg Attorney. | July 28th, 2008 at 4:48 pm #
I tried a few searches with very disappointing results. For one, my name doesn’t bring up my domain anywhere in the top 10. Maybe I’m expecting it to be just like Google, but you’d think the algorithms would have some things in common. We’ll just have to see how it fares.
Medical Transcriptionist | July 28th, 2008 at 9:13 pm #
For cuil bot to crawl and index your site, you can make a request by dropping an email to “crawlme at cuil.com.” See more info on their “about” page.
moserw | July 29th, 2008 at 7:19 am #
Have checked it out myself and while its quite fast and does throw up relevant hits, I for one found Google more comfortable maybe because I have been using it for years.
Kevin Muldoon (Post Author) | July 29th, 2008 at 7:30 am #
I have to agree that results are not as accurate as yet. Though you need to remember Google has been going since 1995 and Cuil is less than a few months old. I think it will be a few years before any search engine has a chance of taking any sort of market share from Google.
Ganesh | July 29th, 2008 at 9:48 am #
You are right. Google is having a monopoly of the market. Another company should be there to keep the competition healthy. Look at Pagerank, Google has total control over it.
Nick | July 29th, 2008 at 10:09 pm #
Glad you cleared up the pronunciation issue in your post though….
But seriously, no one will use something they don’t know if they can say correctly.
Winning Startups | July 30th, 2008 at 9:23 am #
I heard they had a tough day yesterday with technical difficulties. I LOVE the concept and actually came up with the idea a couple years ago, but of course didn’t do anything with it. I think it’s time someone stepped up to the plate and tackled Google. I don’t like the black background they used, but I see they want to be the antithesis of Google so it makes sense.
Internet Business Ideas | July 30th, 2008 at 11:34 am #
Did you notice that Google launched a new search engine?
It is called “Blackle.com” and it is the green answer to google, I don’t think that a black background is very friendly.
As for Cuil, their Alexa rank dropped very quickly.
Tanny
Dax Brady Sheehan | July 31st, 2008 at 11:39 am #
So I wrote a little bit about why the results were so rough for people out there…