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Cuil (pronounced “cool”) was launched this week by former Google employees, intimidating and challenging Google. Now you’re probably wondering “What could make this new engine so special?” There are a few possible answers to that.
For starters, Cuil’s index spans 121 billion web pages. They claim that they are 3 times the size of Google’s index, but there’s no way of knowing that for sure…
“Depending on whose figures you believe, Cuil is less than 20 billion pages away from getting the whole 141 billion shebang under its belt. But a recent Google blog post counters that number, stating that its engineers had noted a total Web page population of over 1 trillion, adding that their index was still the biggest—without actually stating how many pages it contains.” -PC Mag
A real advantage of Cuil comes in the form of their privacy policy, where it states that as of July 27th, they do not keep logs of user activity, nor do they collect any personally identifiable information. They state that they want users to feel comfortable using their engine, as opposed to other engines where users feel stalked and hunted.
Besides anonymous surfing, Cuil uses a different method of searching and displaying than Google does. Rather than display sites based solely on popularity, they display sites based on the web page’s content and organization of ideas. One suspects that they are trying to differentiate their model from Google’s PageRank which relies very heavily and analyzing both a page’s content, as well as the inbound links to that page. While this sounds good at first blush, how will Cuil tackle the problems of pages on irrelevant sites trying to attract irrelevant traffic? If you can build a page on any given topic, this model makes me think I can rank on any given topic. A spammer’s delight perhaps?
The display or search results on Cuil is also done differently, listing sites in a magazine format (left to right, stacked) with pictures alongside of each site suggestion rather than the vertical list. This leads the SEO in me to ask “what is a number 1 rank on this page? Number 2, 3, 4?” This layout may actually benefit the site listed in 4th place for a given search term rather than the one listed second or third. And interesting thing to ponder if Cuil catches on.
Still, there are some kinks that need to be worked out with this engine. As opposed to other search engines, Cuil does not correct spelling - something we’ve all gotten far too used to on Google and Yahoo. A more obvious problem is that, more often than not, the engine brings up irrelevant images next to the sites they are displaying.
Competing with Google is not an easy task, especially when Google has so much to offer in comparison to everyone else. Google can produce multiple specific results, including images, news, shopping and video. Google also offers useful free tools like Google Analytics and Gmail, while Cuil has yet produce anything of that nature. In my opinion, Cuil, although new and “cool”, has a long way to go before they can really prove themselves. However targeting users privacy concerns and making them a selling point, as well as the differentiation from Google’s legendary PageRank algorithm could be a good way to kick things off.