blogonawire

Today I discovered something pretty Cuil (cheesy pun intended). It’s a new search engine designed by a few former Google engineers, including Anna Patterson. “Cuil” is Gaelic for “knowledge” and leads into their tagline “For knowledge ask Cuil.” I spent some time this morning looking for this knowledge and here’s what I’ve learned: 

Black Is the New White

The first difference you notice when you access Cuil is that the background is deep black. Other than that the homepage is very similar to other engines- especially Google -with a simple logo and search box and not much else. The search results on the other hand have a few key differences. My favorite is that results are filtered by tab and category. Tabs suggest other search choices while categories let you drill down further into your results. For example a search for “jeans” will bring back specific categories like “Clothing Brands,” and “1980s Fashion,” while tabs will suggest searches for “Lee Jeans,” or “Blue Jeans.” This can really help narrow down your search to what you’re actually looking for. Another exciting change is the way that results are laid out on the page. Each result shows a picture, site title, site description and URL arranged into three columns. It’s way more visibly appealing in my opinion than the standard text list utilized by Google (and everyone else for that matter.)

Less Is Not More

At least that’s the theory when it comes to search results. As of this morning Cuil claims to search 121,617,892,992 pages - they publish the number right under the search box. Google no longer publishes how many they search but Cuil claims that they search 3x more pages than Google and 10x more pages than Microsoft Live Search. Whether or not these results will be more or less accurate is open to interpretation.

But Sometimes, Less is More

Cuil doesn’t have any of the extras that you see available on other search portals. There are no specialized news/image/shopping/video searches, no email, no customized homepage…just search results. Depending on what you’re looking for this could be great or it could send you right back to Google.

Search Isn’t a Popularity Contest

Cuil’s official line on ranking results is, “Rather than rely on superficial popularity metrics, Cuil searches for and ranks pages based on their content and relevance.” What that means exactly is unclear but I’d have to guess that things like link popularity may not carry much weight in this engine which could change search optimization tactics in the future should Cuil catch on. 

Privacy Promise

Cuil says they spend less time analyzing their users and more time analyzing web pages, “we don’t collect data about you and your habits, lest we are tempted to peek.” - this little tongue in cheek comment may go a long way in converting some people who are worried or uncomfortable about the amount of information search goliaths like Google and Yahoo! are able to track on a per user basis. On the other hand, a lot of people (myself included) enjoy the small perks and customizations that are made possible by all that information tracking.

Old Faithful

The few times I’ve accessed Cuil this morning I’ve run into an error message almost every other time. Generally I’m getting a standard “we are experiencing too much volume to process your request at this time” type message. I think this can be attributed to the buzz generated about the engine this morning causing everyone to rush for a test drive all at once. At the same time if they want to be a serious contender against Google or Live Search they’re going to have to expand their servers to handle that kind of search volume on a regular basis. I think this is their biggest hurdle right now - if people are constantly unable to use the engine they’re likely to give up and go back to their old standby.

Ad-Free Zone

Currently Cuil has no paid advertisements anywhere on the site. They didn’t say anything about this in their policy leading me to believe that they’re simply waiting until they have a bigger following before rolling out that function rather than making an actual philosophical stand about paid search.

I really think that Cuil is here for the long term. If the technical issues are worked out, Cuil is going to surprise some people and really shake up the search engine hierarchy. I’m not sure if it’ll be able to replace the others – especially with the lack of extended functionality - but I could see it easily integrating itself into browsers’ search bars. The next few months will be critical for Cuil to catch on but if it does it’s sure to inspire a cult following. As for me, I’ll be adding it to my favorites to see how it works into my everyday search habits because in all honesty- it’s really cool.