Cuil - What's The Big Deal?
Cuil is rumored to be the "Google Killer" by some posts I have seen about it and when I scan through their website's information I kinda start to believe them. When you visit their company info page you find this bit of boasting:
The Internet has grown exponentially in the last fifteen years but search engines have not kept up—until now. Cuil searches more pages on the Web than anyone else—three times as many as Google and ten times as many as Microsoft.
Rather than rely on superficial popularity metrics, Cuil searches for and ranks pages based on their content and relevance. When we find a page with your keywords, we stay on that page and analyze the rest of its content, its concepts, their inter-relationships and the page’s coherency.
Then we offer you helpful choices and suggestions until you find the page you want and that you know is out there. We believe that analyzing the Web rather than our users is a more useful approach, so we don’t collect data about you and your habits, lest we are tempted to peek. With Cuil, your search history is always private.
Cuil is an old Irish word for knowledge. For knowledge, ask Cuil.
Three times as many sites as Google! That means you're going to be searching more of the Internet than ever before. I'm sure, though, that this is a subtle difference considering that when you go to Google and search for almost anything you're usually staring down a list of a million matches. I suppose maybe in the million matches from Cuil you'd be looking at a different set of results. Better though? That remains to be seen.
Cuil has more to offer than just more indexed pages. They have a few other helpful tricks up their sleeves such as categorizing and automatic filtering of search results. They have 4 main features on their Features page: Drilldown, Roll-over definitions, Tabs, and Navigation suggestion. All of these features appear to be aimed at someone who is searching out something that they don't know much about presumably helping eliminate the need to learn something about what you are searching for before you search for information on it. The Drilldown appears as a list of categories that their engine has determined as related to your search query. They say that "by looking at these suggestions, you may discover search data, concepts, or related areas of interest that you hadn't expected". Sounds good. Roll-over definitions is simply part of the Drilldown. When you hover over a link with your cursor you get a definition of the term you are hovering over. Neato. Tabs is something that looks like a filter to your search. In their words:
Cuil helps you to search by offering you other choices and suggestions. Cuil will show you “Tabs” that suggest ways to clarify your search. For example, if you search for “Jaguar,” there are a number of things you could be searching for, like Jaguar cars, Jaguar cats, a football team called the Jaguars, etc. Just click on the tab that reflects your interest and Cuil will narrow your search appropriately.
That sounds helpful as well! Finally the Navigation suggestion feature is one of those handy "live" dropdown selections at the search box that filters possible search matches to what you are typing in as you type it. You may have seen this feature elsewhere as it is built into many things these days such as the built-in search box on the Firefox browser.
Put all these together and it sounds like you've got a tool much more useful for searching the Internet than Google. Is it really more useful though? Can it replace Google for all searches or is it only good for certain types of searches where their features can really shine? I'll explore these questions in a test drive of Cuil vs. Google in another post. Stay tuned.
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