A few days back the world saw another search engine CUIL.com (pronounced cool), come into being. Cuil well before its launch promised to offer something more than the leader Google. But a few days after being launched the search engine is yet to prove its claims convincingly.
The site generated enough publicity with its claims of bettering Google in terms of its quality and content of its search results. Cuil (means wisdom or knowledge in Gaelic) generated enough traffic one its launch that its servers crashed at 3 p.m on Monday, 28 of July.
So, what makes this search engine so called different from its contemporaries? Cuil is the brainchild of ex-google staffer Anna Patterson who developed the Tera Google system, which Google uses even today. It appears different in its design which is distinctive in nature. The search results appear in three columns across the page and provide longer previews of each site’s content. The results also provide a small snapshot which is small compared to the ones offered by searchme.com. Cuil has claimed to have indexed 120 billion pages as compared to the 1 Trillion indexed by Google. On the speed front, the results take time to get displayed. The search engine focuses on the content of the page to index them instead of ranking them based on popularity.
Google search engine
The following were the results when Dark Knight was searched in Google.
thedarkknight.warnerbros.com/
www.imdb.com/title/tt0468569/
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Dark_Knight_(film)
www.youtube.com/watch?v=WaIR9dAZRR0
www.rottentomatoes.com/m/the_dark_knight/
www.darkknight.ca/
www.apple.com/trailers/wb/thedarkknight/hd/
www.whysoserious.com/happytrails/trailer.htm
movies.yahoo.com/movie/1809271891/info
While the same keywords of Dark Knight in www.Cuil.com produced the following results –
thedarkknight.warnerbros.com/
www.apple.com/trailers/wb/thedarkkn…
atasteforthetheatrical.com/deathtra…
www.aceshowbiz.com/movie/dark_knigh…
www.rasalghul.co.uk/
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Dark_Knig…
www.darkhorizons.com/news06/ledger….
www.movieweb.com/movies/film/81/438…
www.worldsfinestonline.com/DKA/
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Batman%3A_The…
Of the links that appeared in the two search engines on the first page, there were a few links which were common to both of them. Of the unique features, which Cuil has, most of it is confined to the look ‘n’ of its search results. The results are displayed in column layout of the search results which can be viewed in two or three columns whereas in google they are arranged in a linear form.
As far as search results go, Google searched for 27,800,000 results as compared to Cuil which searched for 3,183,977, which gives a clear indication that google is still the front runner when it comes to digging up pages on a topic.
Another noteworthy aspect of the search results displayed in www.Cuil.com is the fact that it provides its users with a tabbed window for different aspects related to the keywords searched.
So, even with all the pleasant look and feel provided by the search engine, it is relatively slow as compared to Google. Also the fact that it searches fewer pages compared to Google means it has to work on its technology to convince and establish itself. The core to a search engine is its efficiency in providing the user with accurate and relevant search results. It is followed by good look and feel of the site. www.Cuil.com with its improved layout design and category specific search results might have met the latter but it would have to ramp its delivery in the search engine efficiency to emerge as an alternative choice for Google. It has a long way to go still…
Do you like Cuil? – If you use Cuil share your experience…..
Cuil is definitely going for it, but it’s hard to imagine them doing anything but incremental changes to what Google’s done. And even that would take years of effort.
Me.dium.com has taken a different tack. We have a full web index, but we change the results based on the surfing activity of our user base (now over 2,000,000). It’s in alpha, but I’d be curious to hear your thoughts. http://me.dium.com/search