Global Geek News Blog

Greetings readers!

In case you spent the day away from you feed reader or failed to listen to any news, a new “Google Killer” search engine has sprung up.  Cuil is a new search engine created by former Google employees which has an index of 120 Billion pages in an attempt to provide better quality search results than Google.  It is this task that Cuil fails miserably.

While I have heard of a few search success stories with this new site, they seem to be in the minority.  Not only is it harder to find what you are looking for, far fewer results are returned compared to google as demonstrated by TechCrunch.  This is expected to be a Google killer?!  Give me a break!  Cuil claims it crawls 120 Billion separate pages, which while it sounds impressive, is nothing compared to Google’s 1 Trillion.

When I tried the service, I noticed two major issues.  First, the layout is far more appealing to the eye than Google.  This is the only thing that has impressed me so far with this new service.  The second was the inaccuracy of search results.  I decided to do a bit of vanity searching and had somebody else come up with my name.  When I used my personal brand, pcnerd37, I received results that were me, but many were small quotes from chatrooms that are not relevant to searching myself in general.  I decided to goole my various websites and blogs, and recieve no results relating to my various projects.  Everything was from other websites that had nothing to do with what I do.

Who is really going to SEO their website again to improve their results in a service that has next to no maketshare.  I dont know about you, but I dont think it is worth it.  Cuil is going to have to do a much better job before it can be taken seriously in the search space.

I dont see this company being around very long for three reasons.  First, Cuil is an absolutely horrible name.  The average joe is not going to remember how to spell something that sounds like one word but is spelled completely differently than anybody has ever seen before.  Unlike Google, Cuil does not have that ring to it that you can tell you friend to go “Cuil it!”  Second, they seem to have no monitization strategy.  Even if they decided to run ads similar to google, there is a huge problem, privacy.  While that doesn’t sound like a bad problem from a user point of view, it is killer for the company.  If you dont know what im talking about, Cuil has announced they they do not keep record of the search results you make, unlike Google.  While this sounds great for the user, this makes serving relevant ads extremely difficult.  If they are unable to serve relevant ads because they don’t have an idea of what their users search for or how, they will die, even if they do have $33 million in venture capital.  Last, Cuil will likely be purchased by a search giant such as Microsoft.  The creators previously sold their search idea to Google and while they say this is not for sale, I am a firm believer in Ferengi Rule of Acquisition #59: Every man has his price.  With Microsoft looking for any way to gain ground against Google, this would make for a natural acquisition for them.  If Microsoft can’t get Yahoo’s search business, it might be a good idea to buy a small company such as Cuil before they get really expensive.  No matter what the reason, I don’t see Cuil having a long existance.

If you are looking to find good search results, stick to Google.  If you want to be frustrated with finding something, give Cuil a shot.  Personally, I will be sticking to a combination of Google and Mahalo for when I want to find what im looking for.

-Jeremy “pcnerd37″ Bray