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by: MICHAEL CHEUNG
Cuil (pronounced “cool”), a startup search engine launched Monday, is the latest in a line of aspiring Google-killers, boasting an index of 120 billion Web pages, “three times more than any other search engine,” according to the co-founders of Cuil.
Built with $33 million in venture capital, Cuil is made up of an all-star team of Web technology veterans. The founders are Tom Costello, creator of Xift, and Anna Patterson, creator of Recall, a technology now used by Google.
However, based on its Monday debut, Cuil poses little immediate threat to industry leader Google, or even its nearest competitors, Yahoo and Microsoft, in either relevance or breadth of results it delivers.
Darren Wilson, our technical consultant, tested out Cuil, and reported a poor experience. Servers were often down, and it delivered irrevelent results with slow loading times.
In a search for “google,” Google delivered 2,740,000,000 results in .1 seconds. Cuil delivered 516,386,388 results in 9.8 seconds. In a search for “cuil,” Google delivered 745,000 results in .14 seconds, while Cuil delivered 121,578 results in 9 seconds. It appears that Cuil hasn’t even indexed itself yet; our search for “cuil” did not return the Cuil front page.
Not only were Cuil search results poor, but it lacked many of the features that Google offers. When you type in a misspelled word into Google, it will attempt to find the correct spelling. When you type in a misspelled word into Cuil, it displays the message “No results because of high load.”
Cuil’s claim to fame as the search engine with the biggest index has also been disputed. Google pointed out that it regularly crawls over 1 trillion web pages to Cuil’s 120 billion.
The one area where Cuil excels, however, is user privacy. While Google stores user-specific searches for up to 18 months, Cuil never stores personally identifiable information or search histories.
Tags: cuil, google, microsoft, search engine, yahoo
July 28, 2008 at 3:38 pm
Cuil MAY be the Google killer. It’s not the best search engine out there but from buzz and hype I saw they made today, they could stand a fighting chance.
July 28, 2008 at 3:45 pm
When everybody I know sent me an email or an IM about Cuil this morning, I figured it had to be a big deal. Unfortunately, the most exciting thing about Cuil is that its founders are ex-Google engineers. It is much like the Ask search engine: it promises big things, but fails to deliver on anything. Try again, Cuil. If you’re going to do something, at least try to do it right.
July 28, 2008 at 4:03 pm
More competition in the search engine world!
July 28, 2008 at 8:09 pm
Is Cuil the next Google-killer? Well, if it hasn’t even indexed itself…
July 28, 2008 at 9:52 pm
Cuil lost me when I searched for “hagel vice-president” and got ZERO results, but got 19,000 results when searching for “hagel vice president”. If it can’t even parse a hyphen, how advanced can it be?
Pretty unimpressive, I have to say. I was hoping to be amazed but wasn’t even amused. Maybe give it another shot if others start having good results.
July 28, 2008 at 9:55 pm
I tried it. It sucks. Back to Google.
July 29, 2008 at 11:46 am
People are critizing Cuil, but you have to remember that it was created with only $35 million in funding…while Google has so much more money to maintain its servers.
July 29, 2008 at 4:57 pm
@techdeck:
That’s true, but the problem is, Cuil has not shown that its technology is better than Google’s in any way, so therefore no company would want to fund it.
July 29, 2008 at 5:09 pm
Cuil fell WAY short of my expectations. A search for “washington d.c.” “n.y.” and “George W. Bush” comes up empty, until the periods are removed. If Cuil cannot analyze periods, please pardon me for being unimpressed.
Oh, and, if you’re going to make the bold statement that you’re better than Google, please make sure that your servers can handle the traffic. The Digg effect should not have an effect on large sites.
July 29, 2008 at 5:22 pm
Hey, well, you never know, Microsoft might buy Cuil. In fact, I wonder if Cuil is planning to sell itself to some desperate Internet company.
July 29, 2008 at 5:46 pm
Three out of the first four things I searched for returned no results. Really. I thought it was broken. Er, more broken than it is.
July 31, 2008 at 11:07 am
I tried it and half of the time they tell me they found no matches for my search. Then they display how many pages of results they have at the bottom of the page from your search and in between cliking on the links it tells me there is no results found for my search while i was just looking at the results and lost them it between clicking the links. Something is wrong with their search engine. Another thing is the the number of pages they found for you search keeps changing as you click on the other pages of your search result.