Cuil – game changing silliness or just silliness?
Cuil is a brand new search engine that claims to have the biggest bleeping index of WWW pages known to man (and mostly, I imagine, machines, as in bots and scrapers). It’s the brain child of a small group of ex-Google employees and it has received a lot of attention among the kind of people who bestow attention on search engines. An enormous amount of attention, actually.
I imagine one can grade a search engine on many different factors, five of which ought to be index size, relevancy of search results, presentation of search results, speed of return of search results, and how well my pages rank in the search results.
As far as the size of the index goes, I have no idea but for the sake of argument I take Cuil at its word. The easiest way to describe the relevancy of the search results on Cuil is to say that they are a close approximation of what Google SERPs would look like if the that site was hacked by web spammers. It’s mindboggling how much pure dreck ranks very, vey high on Cuil. Cuil is quite slow right now, in part, I imagine because it’s beta service is flooded by people googling themselves and their most important keywords (“cheap refi mortgages modesto ca.” Goddamn it, how can they do that to me?). I get the impression that Cuil puts a very strong emphasis on link volume, which gives aggregating and spam sites a huge leg up.
Which leaves us with the most interesting part of Cuil and perhaps its lasting legacy: The presentation. One of the things that Google did in upending the search-engine industry was to bring the focus back on search and only on search. The big portal sites in the late 1990′s were convinced that search was a secondary feature and a quite mature consumer product. Google proved them wrong, not only by bringing a new approach to sorting search results but also by doing nothing but sorting search results. The bloated portal sites were in effect crushed by Google’s visually austere killer app.
Cuil is trying to take a bit out of Google’s pie by bringing a heavy dose of what one might call pretty to SERPs. Instead of the dry list of search results with titles, summaries and links Cuil serves up a magazine-inspired layout with multiple coulmns and pictures that presumably are relevant to the summarized and excerpted sites. Can SERP-based social networking with cuilsters who cuiler each other cuilies be far behind?
Google is actually the only search-engine that moved consumers in a major way. Alta Vista was generally recognized as superior to its pre-Google competitors, but Yahoo’s directory so mesmerized users that it didn’t particularly matter (plus DEC couldn’t tell a consumer from a hole in the wall). Norwegian search-engine technology company Fast had and still has a really good search engine but fell prey to the self-defeating notion that search was a commodity. Instead of building its own brand it licensed its services to dying second-rate had-beens like Lycos. It is highly unlikely that Cuil can topple Google, darn near impossible, actually, but it could well change the way search is presented and used.
