Too Cuil For School And Anyone Who Wants Relevant Searches

There was a great deal of hype building for the new search engine Cuil (pronounced “cool”), which launch on Monday this week.  Unfortunately for Cuil, this hype built up into a PR nightmare that we find happening all too often these days.  At 3PM on Monday, Cuil’s servers crashed.  The site functioned sporatically as it tried to deal with all of the traffic coming in.  And when it did function, the search results left much to be desired.  So with such a lackluster start, why did it have so much promise?  Because two words kept popping up anytime someone mentioned Cuil: Google Killer.

Cuil is the latest creation from Anna Patterson, a former Google staff member.  She began working for Google when they purchased an indexing system she had written - now known as TeraGoogle - that is still in use at Google to this day.  So when Anna left Google and announced that she would be launching her own search engine, heads started turning.  Anna put together a team of four, all of them ex-Googlers, including her husband.  Together, they raised $33 million in financing.  So when bold claims were made that Cuil’s indexing of over 120 billion web pages would put Google to shame, people began to talk about the possibility of something better than Google.

The reality, however, is far bleaker.  Cuil’s inability to handle the opening day rush of traffic has put a dark mark on what is only beginning to emerge as a reputation.  Google rival?  Certainly not today.  Microsoft and Yahoo! have nothing to worry about, either.  Really, most startups have a better first day than Cuil.  So what are the problems?

Well, first and foremost is that the search results don’t hold enough relevancy.  Rather than cite example after example of disappointing results, I encourage you to check it out for yourself and search for some things you are accustomed to finding on Google, then save yourself some time and put on a sad face now while you wait for the limited number of (inaccurate) results to show up in a 3-column layout that needlessly crams in images and takes up valuable page real estate.  Why all the cruddy results?  Cuil’s search results are based on content.  It crawls through web pages and finds out what their relevance is, then associates that with what you’re searching for.  This is great in theory, and it’s what all search engines used to do years ago.  But Google moved away from that and began to take a site’s popularity into account when creating search results.  This is why Google’s results are so darn relevant every.single.time, and it’s why Cuil is making me wonder, “Why all the hype?”

There is one thing that I applaud Cuil for, though, and that’s user privacy.  As much as we all love Google, they have a nasty habit of storing user search information for up to 18 months.  I don’t care much for that, and neither do most people, including the Cuil crew.  Cuil never stores information from your searches that are personally identifiable.  Kudos, Cuil!  Still not using you…

So, while it may be too early to see a Google killer in the mix, I do find it interesting that so many people are interested in seeing one.  As Google has grown into the super-mega-crazy-behemoth that it is, a question formed in the collective minds of the public - When is something so large going to topple?  While many of us enjoy using the multitude of programs from Google, we also have that part of us that wants to see if it can fail miserably.  A world of cautious cynics and doomsayers waiting to see if someone can step up to the plate.  That someone will not be Cuil, but seeing everyone jump on it like they did should speak volumes to Google as it moves out of conglomerate infancy and settles into familiar dominance.