In short, Cuil (pronounced ‘cool’) is a brand new search engine founded by a team consisting of ex-Googlers and various other Internet entrepreneurs including the founder of AltaVista. The team contained members who had worked on Google’s search engine index itself, and led real credence to their claims.

Cuil stated they had a larger index to Google, provided more relevant results by analysing content rather then incoming links and had a more intuitive interface.

What happened was that Cuil crashed soon after launching, got back online then began providing some pretty dodgy results for search terms. It consequently got slammed across the blogosphere and media, not too good a beginning for any startup.

How did this happen?

CNET revealed that the non-relevant results was a consequence of the differing architecture of Cuil’s searching technology compared to Google.

“This is because Cuil isn’t set up as a massively parallel search network the way, say, Google is… Each of Cuil’s search appliances is specialized to a particular subcategory of results. There are machines that understand and index sports; others are experts on medicine, etc. As these search machines get overloaded, Sollitto said, they drop offline for some queries, and the machines left online return less-than-relevant results that then appear at the top of users’ pages.”

This sounds plausible enough but I guess the real question is, Will this make a better search product eventually? Considering Google still stands head and shoulders above its competitors in terms of relevancy Cuil is going to have to do a lot of work to make headway against such a web giant.

The other main issue was in how Cuil marketed itself. Claims of a bigger index is really quite pointless considering that when Google itself launched, it had the smallest index out of all the 90’s search engines.

Cuil’s arguments about search indexing technology also seemed a little inaccurate by stating they would create more relevant results by analysing content itself, not just incoming links like Google. Considering Google’s entire business depends on the accuracy of its indexing its ridiculous to assume linking is the only determinate of their results. An estimated 200 different factors are used in the Google search algorithm and are constantly tweaked. Google recognizes there is no one way pages can be ranked relevantly and perhaps Cuil should to.

Cuil faces a lot more competition then Google did back in 1998 so I’ll be interested to see how this turns out. I do think their interface is more intuitive, however unfortunately even that could do with some ironing out as the pages seem to associate completely random images with websites.

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Cuil is still up and running which seems to speak for the server infrastructure but can they compete with the dominant Google search engine and the other competitors like Yahoo Search or Windows Live?

Search Engines distinguish each others by the relevancy of their results and additional services that might help the user in his search of the perfect website.

Cuil presents us a simplistic fast loading front page that uses a black background color in contrast to Google’s white. The real surprise awaits users after typing in a search term and hitting the Search button; The results are not displayed in rows but in columns. The user can choose a layout with two or three columns. The amount of search results shown remains the same but the three column layout makes good use of widescreen monitors.

Search results are also mixed with images that do not always seem to come from the website that the result links to. A click on the image does however load the same link. This could however cause some confusion by visitors who expect to see the image on that website.

The real question is of course about relevancy and that’s tough to measure objectively. What I like is that Cuil is not having a maximum limit of results that are shown from one website in the results. A search for Ghacks displays many pages of my website. If I perform the same search on Google I get 2 out of 10 results for my website, Cuil displays 9 of 11. Not all are that relevant though.

The search quality on the other hand has to improve to match Google’s. That’s my opinion and based on a few keywords and phrases that I typed into both search engines. But for a first day it’s a solid start, one that could bring some fresh air into the search engine world.

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