Yet another Google-Killer search engine was launched this month. There have been lots of previous great hopes like Hakia, Mahalo, Search Wikia, Gigaweb and Exalead. None have come even close to denting Google. Now there is Cuil. Unlike the previous contenders Cuil was set up by some ex-Google natural search bods from TeraGoogle (Google’s search index side).
Just before the launch of Cuil Google had a press release to say it tracked more than 1 trillion URLs, taking the wind out of the sails of Cuil who claimed 120 billion. This reminds me of the ‘indexed pages’ wars of the late 1990’s where the search engines of the time continued to boast of the number of indexed pages on their databases. This was eventually dropped as it dawned on most users that relevancy, not size, matters.
Having a look at it Cuil I have to say I like the ‘magazine’ style lay out. But doing some searching I found it very US based. Cuil claims to use Web page content as its main measure of relevancy in a way that goes beyond Google’s link analysis. This strikes me as a retrograde step as link analysis is what catapulted Google forward when they started. It will be with improving link analysis, amongst other factors, that will take search technology forward
We look forward to seeing our first Cuil related traffic figures on our client sites.
