Cuil.com and the search for relevance…

The newest kid on the search engine block has a clean, sexy look and layout. Cuil.com (presumably pronounced ‘cool’ or perhaps ‘kyewl’?) proclaims itself to search more pages on the internet than anyone else. “Three times as many as google, and 10 times as many as Microsoft,” according to the about us page. Perhaps their software has the tools to quickly become this large, but my experience suggests they have not yet achieved this.

When I searched for ‘UltraFuture’ - the results were 3,760 pages for Google, 225 for Cuil. Google may have had a number of duplicates, but the first page of Google at least shows me the ultrafutureworld.com homepage (which, frankly, is very relevant to my search). Cuil did not show the homepage in any of my search results.

Self-interest and obvious bias aside, a search for BMW resulted in 57 Million for Cuil, 271 Million for Google.  Again no contest. However, the Cuil.com search did feature an interesting ‘Explore by Category’ feature that allows you to refine your terms to provide you optimized relevance before performing the actual search. Again, this feature looks great and appears to be useful.

Cuil suggests that its software searches by ‘content and relevance’, as opposed to ’superficial popularity metrics’.  Perhaps they simply haven’t been around long enough to collect all the pages they need to be as large as Google. They also claim to not collect any personal data, believing that the web should be searched rather than peoples habits.

Very nice looking site, with a nice interface and experience. While their scale is not yet quite what they suggest, privacy is one position that Cuil.com may be well-advantaged and well-advised to compete in. Let’s check back in a few months.