Cuil: Bigger is better
In Cuil, we have a search engine that competes with Google even though the company says it doesn't. But Cuil is going directly after what made Google so popular: a huge index of websites providing relevant search results. But Cuil is trying to go bigger and better.
"Pure search, that's our focus," says Vince Sollitto, vice president of communications at Cuil. "Here is a search engine doing its own crawl of the web, trying to crawl the whole web, and is basically offering web-wide, consumer-oriented automated search. I don't know of any other search engine startup that has really tried to offer that in the recent past. Because of what we're attempting to do and what we're seeking to offer, we immediately get lumped into the category of Google, Yahoo, Ask, Microsoft, etc., because that was what we're offering. But obviously, we're two months in versus 10 years."
Point taken. While the visual differences of Cuil -- a black background, a magazine-style layout, longer snippets on individual results and corresponding images next to each result -- are evident, search engines live and die by their results. Here, Cuil is aiming high and claims to index 120 billion websites-- three times more than any other search engine. The engine also claims to provide more accurate, content-based search results.
On the surface, 120 billion pages looks like a big number, and more is certainly better when searching. But Google announced in July that it maps more than 1 trillion URLs. That's not necessarily all unique pages, or even pages, that Google indexes, but still -- a trillion with a "T." We ultimately don't know how many pages Google indexes, so although Cuil claims advantage here, it's difficult to determine a winner.
Even if there's more to crawl, you still have to find the good results. Cuil approaches this differently than Google, preferring to rely on page content rather than popularity. Sollitto says Cuil uses "very intensive data mining and algorithms that learn based on patterns and relationships between data sets, to determine what's the content on the page, what it's about." Cuil's process puts pages into various categories, and when people search, the engine delivers results from various related categories. Users can then "drill deeper" by browsing through a category.
While the idea of working from page content is great -- rather than relying on the mass appeal of any site -- the results aren't always that spectacular. Sites you don't expect may pop up, exposing you to new resources. But plenty of sites that you would expect don't turn up. That said, Cuil's search engine is only a few months old, so we'll cut it some slack.
Directly taking on Google, whether Cuil admits it or not, takes some courage. For that reason alone, it's worth keeping Cuil on your radar. If the content-based search improves over the next year or so, Cuil could start grabbing a small percentage of the market. The other dilemma is this: You can Yahoo, you can Google -- but can you Cuil?
