What Is It?

Cuil is a new search engine. It has been the subject of posts on the popular tech blogs in the last few days (1 posts, they all post )

While I haven’t read them all the only thing I really picked up was that the pictures disabled didn’t always correspond with the search result.

So Why Am I Posting?

Well, because I gave it a try and was surprised at the results (or lack of them returned).

Cuil have some very good PR words on their About page and on their Philosophy page. They talk about some very interesting values for web searches which I am mostly in agreement with if only they can deliver them.

Some of the main points Cuil make are:

(Please click on any image to enlarge where necessary)

The Internet has grown exponentially in the last fifteen years but search engines have not kept up—until now. Cuil searches more pages on the Web than anyone else—three times as many as Google and ten times as many as Microsoft.

Rather than rely on superficial popularity metrics, Cuil searches for and ranks pages based on their content and relevance.

and

Cuil’s goal is to solve the two great problems of search: how to index the whole Internet—not just part of it—and how to analyze and sort out its pages so you get relevant results.

it’s well worth reading their About Us and Philosophy pages if you are interested in what Cuil (and good search engines should) strive to achieve.

The current problem seems to be that they are failing to meet their aims by a rather long way.

So What’s the Evidence

Well I am as bad as anyone when it comes to the “ego search” and fortunately I have the advantage of a less popular first name and an uncommon surname, so the combination of the 2 normally result in fairly limited hits from a search engine. I am also fairly familiar with the hits I expect to see from the “major” search sites in popular use . I also regularly search against proreviewer and my name as well as post subjects to see how my posts rank.

(Generally pretty well – )

So when I read the posts on Cuil I set out to try a few of the standard searches that I usually try on Google. (If you want a good reason as to why I use Google then look at this report on traffic sources to Proreviewer from Google Analytics – it seems that most of the world use Google)

I first tried a basic search in Cuil of

barry cleave

and got the following result:

as you can see there is no barry cleave in the first returned result (top left)

Google will return:

and in fact al the results down to 15 except number 10relate to me and other results I see are expected relating to other barry cleave web pages for people with the same names.

You will notice above that barry cleave does not appear on Cuil in the first position nor does it appear on the page or subsequent pages Ok you may say that this is vanity on my part but the fact is that I am using a fairly unique search term on a search engine that claims to index more pages than Google and is meant to be providing relevant results. No hits of barry cleave, whether me or someone else, is not providing relevant results.

So I tried the search again and interestingly now got 26,331 results for barry cleave as against the 36,302 results for barry cleave from the first time I searched – what caused the difference in a couple of minutes?

Moving on to a phrase search – “barry cleave” appears to be no better:

Go to Page 2 for more details and screenshots

Go to Page 3 for ProReviewer Summary

(see Page Navigation below)

Popularity: 16% [?]

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This entry was posted on Wednesday, July 30th, 2008 at 7:43 pm and is filed under Articles. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.