Cuil (An Irish word that means knowledge) was launched on 28th July 2008 by the Former Google Employees with a single handed aim to displace Google. Have they done it? Cuil claims to be a Google Killer. They claim to have indexed 3 times as many pages as Google, and 10 times as many pages as MSN. It has a fresh and new layout when compared to the layout of Google and other Search engines.
Cuil vs Google
httpv://in.youtube.com/watch?v=vfLGOJ_-gT8
Statistics and facts:
- USP: Analyze the content of the web pages (provide knowledge, not information)
- Web pages scanned and indexed: 120 billion (3x Google’s index, 10x Microsoft’s index)
- Page Rank: 4
- Worldwide Alexa ranking: 2,381(Cuil Alexa Traffic Details)
- Number of hits on launch day: 50 million+ (largest ever on a launch day for any search engine)
- Number of web pages with word ‘Cuil’: Google 1.32M, Live 1.3M, Yahoo! 1.62M, ZapMeta 1.8M
- Venture capital raised: $33 million
- Number of employees: 30
Features that stand out:
- Focus is on your Search Results. There are no advertisements in Search results of Cuil as yet, which is good as some of these companies showing ads are poor in quality.
- List of subjects and Categories related to your Search
- Search term suggestions. It Gives some Inline Keyword Suggestions
- Magazine style reading
- Safe search
Cuil has failed in some aspects;
- Their search results are not accurate.
- The 3 Column display is Unnatural and the two column display leaves half your screen blank.
- Lack of preferences.
- No URL Submit Option. However you need to mail them in order to be indexed if you don’t find your site in their SERP’s. Check out http://www.cuil.com/info/webmaster_info/
- The images that appear next to some search listings are sometimes completely random.
Some Layout Enhancements in Cuil are;
a) Paging: There is a small improvement on Paging in Cuil. You need to scroll down in other search engines (Google, yahoo, msn etc) to get to the paging. Whereas in Cuil, you always have the paging visible at the bottom while you scroll down or up the search results area.
b) Item Listing: Search results can be listed in 2 Columns or 3 Columns.
c) The description for each Search result is more than that shown in Google.
d) Cuil also keeps offering up images to go with sites in the search results, but these images have nothing to do with either the topic or the sites. But this pictorial Search results makes the Search results a little more attractive when compared to Google Search Results.
The layout is pretty cool, but the sites I’m pulling up aren’t all relevant to my search terms as compared to my experience with Google Search results for the exact same term.
Since Cuil is still recently launched, there are still a lot of bugs to be fixed and Improvements to be done. For example: Cuil is available only in English whereas Google is available in every Language for almost every country.
Looks like there are lots of bugs to still work out. Nice to see another alternative to Google though.
Will knowledge (Cuil) win over information (Google)?
I think cuil Search Engine Results are crappy. Lets take an example with a keyword that is extremely popular -> “free porn”
Visit Google.com and Cuil.com and Check their Search Engine Result Pages for the above phrase. Cuil has terrible results. It actually had split free porn into 2 separate words “free” and “porn” and gave results.
Isn’t that total Crap?
[...] wrote an article after discussing others experience with the search engine. here is my findings : http://www.iwebie.com/cuil-vs-google WHAT do you Guys think. Or just tell me if you guys will use this Search Ever again. A comment [...]
I think that one day it will win
I read your blog every once in a while and I must say that I like your template!
What I do not think I agree with that at all really.
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