How cool is Cuil?

29 July 2008 - 10:12

Yesterday saw the launch of a new search engine. Cuil (pronounced "cool", and named after the Gaelic word for "knowledge") has been developed by former Google employees. It claims to have indexed more than three times the number of pages as Google, and to base its results purely on content and relevance, not link popularity. If true, it could make the entire search engine optimization (SEO) "profession" redundant. Hooray! But how well does it work in practise?

Not very, if my initial searches are anything to go by. Since Tech-Pro.net web pages are written by a former journalist with little patience for boring tasks like link building, I imagined that they might score better for content than for link popularity, and I expected to see some of our pages ranking better in Cuil than in Google. In fact, I found the reverse. Search terms for which we rank #1 or at least on the first page in Google and Yahoo found us nowhere in Cuil. This is admittedly not a scientific test nor an impartial judgement. But it does give cause to reflect on why existing search engines consider link popularity to be important. That is because a link is a vote in favor of the page it points to which shows that someone - a real, thinking person - thought it was worth a look at. A decision made purely by a computer algorithm is never going to be as good. Certainly link popularity can be manipulated, but Google has got very good at detecting and ignoring sites like directories and article repositories that exist purely to provide links to other sites.

Cuil includes pictures beside search results because "people can make better and quicker decisions about relevance and quality when they can see an image from the website." Nice idea. But most of the pictures in the results I saw were not relevant at all. The picture in the search result for Tech-Pro World Clock was not of the application itself. I did not even recognize it as a picture from our website. None of the search results that mentioned our world clock showed the application screenshot, though many showed screenshots of other developers' world clocks. So the pictures are not merely not relevant, but may be downright misleading.

As BBC Technology Correspondent Rory Cellan-Jones says in his blog, in a world where "google" has become a verb for "to search the web", Cuil has a massive task ahead of it to persuade users to switch. It's a nice try, but I for one will stick to googling with Google.