Case Analysis - Cuil
We’ve had a new entrant in internet-search spaces, called Cuil, which, as per popular fiction, is supposedly out there to compete with Google. Anyhow, I spend some time playing around and reading accessible literature on it and here are my observations: -
- Indexing: Most hyped is the size of its massive index (~120 billion pages), as also quoted in their info page - “Cuil searches more pages on the Web than anyone else—three times as many as Google and ten times as many as Microsoft”. However, I didn’t find any conclusive proof for this in that Google still listed more total hits on most of my test-searches. [Example SearchKey = 'Sushain': Cuil - 662 | Google - 929]
Now, this may still improve with time, so we’ll let this one pass.
- Renewal rate: Now, they might have indexed more pages than Google but their index still doesn’t contain recent links. Indexing recent content is really critical to search engines and again, they should improve on this front with time.
- Page ranking: The info page also says - “Rather than rely on superficial popularity metrics, Cuil searches for and ranks pages based on their content and relevance. When we find a page with your keywords, we stay on that page and analyze the rest of its content, its concepts, their inter-relationships and the page’s coherency.”
The issue I found was that sometimes the searches listed ‘not-so-important’ results before more-relevant ones. For instance, listing the pages linked to someone’s friend (via a social network) before actually putting the person’s site-listing etc. In my case, it shows my name being present in my friend’s HiFi n/w, before pointing anything relevant to me (and I haven’t put a robots.txt file on my website yet to stop crawlers :-)).
- Infrastructure: Many a times, during my experimentation, Cuil would just give a ‘We’ll be back’ message, or wouldn’t repeat the results that were generated for the same query, some time ago. Again, there’s room for improvement and they would do well to evolve with time.
- Layout: I’ve personal hots for dark (energy-saving) backgrounds and Cuil scores there. Even otherwise, the results are laid out in a better way and are easy to spot, but again, I think I’ve seen this before on proprietary search-engines.
- Privacy: Cuil does claim to be the good-boy search engine n not track the data et al, but the bottom-line still is how good the search capability is.
Final verdict: Well, I’m pretty much in favor of any new-comer into a partially monopolized domain (Though I love Google as much as anyone :-)). The only issue I’ve is that they really could’ve done some more ground-work before making this live (Links on Info and Privacy weren’t working till yesterday) since the first impression really goes a long way. All in all, I think, we need to give more time to Cuil; No enterprise gets build in a day and Cuil should be appreciated to have at least taken an initiative in an otherwise one-firm show.
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