Cuil vs. Google

By now if you probably heard about Cuil, the new search engine that claims to be the biggest (since when does size matter when it comes to search engines?) And secondly is being given a PR pass because it was created by 'ex-Google employees' - I guess that's a major element for success?

Anyway, after doing my obvious test searches, like Curacao, Arlington Mass, and BlogBridge, I thought I would try each against an actual useful search I had been doing over the weekend:

ipod cradle wireless sync

See the results for yourself: Google results and Cuil Results.

Anyway it's just one test, but for me the Cuil results for the ipod cradle produced no results at all!

Give everyone the benefit of the doubt though:

• Why are people making a fuss about the fact that it was down on day one?


• I will check my test search again in coming days because it easily good be a transient condition

Comments

[Jered]

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.

[Will]

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..)

[Kendall]

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.

[Jered]

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

What a joke...

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