Comments on: Cuil vs. Google

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Mon, 25 Aug 2008 17:09:37 +0000

[...] Hmm, let me try the query that tripped up Cuil: [...]

By: Jered

Jered — Wed, 30 Jul 2008 16:08:33 +0000

OK, it seems to return results now, though not very many. And it tags all the results with irrelevant images!

What a joke…

By: Kendall

Kendall — Wed, 30 Jul 2008 01:30:17 +0000

I’d like to add in my two cents. based on some basic searches that I’ve done, mostly for work-related things, cuil seems to be better at sorting relevant results: it’s downfall, if you want to call it that, is that it doesn’t really show irrelevent results, or results of things that aren’t explicitly part of what you searched. in some ways, this is a lot nicer than what google has going for it- my work involves looking for stuff that’s generally well-hidden, and it’s nice not to have to search 300 pages of google results to find one relevant hit- but it also means that small stuff (blogs, etc) doesn’t get a lot of coverage. it seems like searching for something too specific won’t return much, because Cuil’s crawlers focus on pages that are specifically about whatever it is that is searched for, and not just pages that happen to mention it. for me, this is a very good thing. I wish google had options like this in it’s search preferences. for most other people, I understand that it’s not a good thing all the time.

anyway, long story short, don’t bash this yet. I’ve already found it to be (in some specialized ways) much more useful than google.

By: Will

Will — Mon, 28 Jul 2008 19:55:37 +0000

Funny thing is, the Google results for that ipod search currently return *this blog entry*. Before they might have returned sensible product results, but now Google sees this as more relevant. Is it really? I feel like if I were searching for ipod cradle wireless sync, I’d probably not be looking for it used as an example in a blog post. (I probably made it worse by quoting the search terms again…heh..)

By: Jered

Jered — Mon, 28 Jul 2008 18:52:59 +0000

Not only that, but “Pito Salas” returns no results too!

I don’t understand the buzz about these alternate search engines; PowerSet was equally disappointing when they “launched”. I think the real reason for the news coverage is that people like to hear about new businesses that “challenge the leader”, even if they, well, don’t.

The extra special weird thing about search is that writing and running a search engine is not a profitable business. Being the dominant search engine just means that Google gets lots and lots of page views that they can stick (very expensive) CPC ads on, and that they can demand very high prices because they have such volume. The only way to make a new search engine profitable (in the same way) is by getting a very significant portion of the traffic… which seems tremendously unlikely.