In recent days, there’s been a great deal of fuss about the latest addition to the plethora of available search engines - Cuil (pronounced ‘cool’, apparently). Cuil is apparently, according to it’s promoters, a far superior concept to Google, but is it really any good?
Well, out of curiosity, I did some comparison searches on Google, and on Cuil. Google prides itself on PageRank, which is basically a measure of a page’s popularity - this is how their search results are organised and prioritised (by and large). Cuil, on the other hand, claims to provide more relevant results, stating that popularity doesn’t always equal relevance - sounds like a great theory (of course, when you think about it, revelant things tend to become very popular, very quickly… so popularity is often a very good measure).
A simple base-line search was for my name (”James Burgess”) - nothing else. On Google, I get the home page of myself returned at the top, following by a bunch of other people with “James Burgess” in their name… a little further on, and you can find lots of website profiles (some mine, some not). In my view, this seems to be a very relevant and obvious way to display results - sure, if you’re looking for something obscure or unique it requires a bit of extra digging… but how often are you alone in your quest for knowledge about a certain thing? Not very often.
So, obviously, performing this same search with Cuil was necessary and, with the nice black interface greeting me, I was hoping for something that was simply brilliant. Instead, the search results were headed up by companies called Flexilis and SpiralFrog - with the former link being seemingly unrelated to either name, let alone both together - and the latter being linked primarily with my surname. To find the blog/site/profile of anyone with my exact name (not exactly an obscure name)… it took until page 10. To find my blog/site, well, I gave up after page 20. Most of the pages inbetween were irrelevant, linking to entirely unrelated websites, or simply duplicating the links that had been previously shown (maybe with an added “www.” or similarly trivial difference).
I found out more about Alaska’s #1 radio station than I did about anyone with either of my names.
This, coupled with the apalling picture caching (the pictures are all wrong for the websites) makes for an absolutely terrible search engine… and something that will most certainly not take the fight to Google in it’s current state.
