Cuil is a new search engine co-founded by a husband and wife team, Stanford professor Tom Costello and Anna Patterson, a former Google "search architect", together with Russell Power, a former Google colleague of Patterson. The Cuil web site explains that Cuil is Irish for knowledge and should be pronounced cool.
Cuil claims a larger database and better results. According to the FAQ, they started with "a fresh approach, an entirely new architecture and breakthrough algorithms.". Obviously, Cuil was infiltrated by marketroids even before they got started.
The number of pages in the search index not mean much. What matters is results, so what matters is whether the right pages are in there and whether the search engine manages to find these as a result of you query.
Cuil claims to provide better results because it uses a better ranking system. Google’s PageRank is based on the number of inbound links, while Cuil analyses the content of a page to determine relevancy.
That is a obviously a simplified presentation of things. Google does not
ignore page content, and Cuil probably does not ignore links, but an emphasis on
content does sound like the right approach.
It just isn’t an easy approach. Content-based searching is a tough problem.
I tried a few searches and immediately noticed that the site is rather slow. Each query easily takes second, and a few took several minutes - That’s several minute to return "Connection Interrupted. The documented contains no data".
According to the Cuil FAQ "We know from our research that people can make
better and quicker decisions about relevance and quality when they can see an
image from the website. We do our best to take images from Web pages that
accurately reflect the content of the website. Many websites are full of images,
so we use advanced algorithms to determine the best image to show the user."
That sounds good, but it does not work.
I have English and Dutch ancestors. A search for my Dutch family name returned the family site as the top result. No surprise there, but Cuil showed a German flag next to it. This is a site about a Dutch family name on a Dutch host, and Cuil shows a German flag next to it. It is bizarre, and scores 16 million minus point for cultural insensitivity.
There are various flags on the emigration page of the web site, but no German
flag. There is a graphic on the home page, and there is a favicon, yet Cuil
displays a German flag. That’s not the result of some "advanced algorithm".
There obviously is no "advanced algorithm", as even a dumb algorithm would pick
the Dutch flag. This is graphic failure.
More fundamental than Cuil’s cultural insensitivity is that you cannot trust
their search page content to reflect the sites it returned. When its "advanced
algorithm" fails, Cuil decides to editorialise and makes things up.
That is a serious mistake. A search engine that wants to be trusted should never
make things up.
A distant family member has a site for a her own fashion label. My family site has more than one link to it, but apparently, their bot is not smart enough to follow links? I typed in her name, and Cuil failed to find her site. It simply isn’t in their index.
I tried more queries, and it seems to me that their bigger index does not make up for their poor ranking by what they call their "breakthroughs in search architecture". The relevance of most search results is disappointingly low. The one thing Cuil excels at is wasting your bandwidth with utterly unrelated images.
Cuil is one of those search engines that return clustered results - results sorted are into groups and a menu offers drill-drown. Unlike some other engines I’ve tried, its grouping seems fairly sensible. This is obviously one area that they spent some energy on.
It did not try to be overly smart handling a family name, but simple provided drill-down based on local place names. Cuil does not create and remember any groups, but simply submits a new query - your original query combined with the word you just clicked. This little thing may be Cuil’s smartest feature.
Why you enter a word that means more than one thing, Cuil will show tabs above the results, to let you focus on just one meaning. Great idea, if it worked - When I search for "Palm", it will offer tabs to search for "Palm Tree" and "Palm Pilot", but for "Palm Springs", "Palm Pilot" and "Palm Beach". Not only did Cuil include "Palm Springs" and "Palm Beach" for no apparent reason, but it left out "Palm tree"....
There are practically no options. You can turn Safe Search on and off. You cannot increase the number of results it shows per page, or speed up display of results by opting for results without pictures.
I tried an exact match using quote marks, but that does not seem to work. Cuil returned less matches then it without the quote marks, but only a few contained the phrase I looked for, most pages contained just the words, but not the phrase.
There appears to be no advanced search whatsoever. The site does not document any ability to restrict searches by language, document type or domain.
Another advanced feature That’s missing is an alert service. And although it easy to hire someone to make one, there is not even a toolbar.
According to the FAQ, there should be an "Add Cuil to Firefox" at the
bottom of the search results page to add Cuil to Firefox’s search toolbar. If
you browse safely, that link is not there. Cuil demands scripting permission on
both the cuil.com and the cuilimg.com domains before it will show that link.
I added Cuil to the search toolbar, and it is now the only search engine on
there that does not display a favicon.
A concern abut search engines like Google is that they keep your search
history. One good thing about Cuil is that it does not keep any information on
you. As their FAQ says "We analyze the Web, not our users.".
The only thing they store in a cookie is your search preferences.
It is bit painful though, that when I tried to visit their Privacy Policy, they showed me "Oops! We couldn’t find that page.", followed by "Please verify that the URL is correct and try again". By the way, I saw those messages more than once. This seems to be a performance issue with their site, as these pages will display if you keep retrying often enough.
Cuil’s own site claims to be XHTML 1.0 Transitional, but it does not validate. They do use UTF-8.
The site’s slow response could be attributed to the huge number of curious visitors, but if they cannot handle that, they do not belong in the search business. I tried their new site, and I found that it is slow.
One thing their FAQ does not address is how Cuil hopes to make money. There
is nothing about advertisements, search appliances or anything like that.
That searches for commercial products lead to manufacturer websites is only
logical, but it seems to be the only kind of search that Cuil is remotely good
at, and that makes it worrisome that Cuil does not distance itself from paid
placement.
I am seriously underwhelmed by Cuil. It does not keep information on your searches, but their site does not validate and its privacy policy is missing in action, unless you figure that you have keep refreshing the page until you get lucky.
Cuil claims a big index, but the second site I looked for is not in it. It claims more relevant results, but I find rather worrisome that it makes things up.
If it were an otherwise great search engine, the constant delays in providing results would still be a real turn-off. And if that was not bad enough, the site offers just a few results per page, no way to turn images off, and no advanced search features at all. Search is excruciatingly slow and exact search does not work.
The one thing Cuil excels at is wasting your bandwidth on utterly unrelated images. They got their privacy policy right, but that hardly matters with a search engine so poor.
Google Trends number 35 shows what the world thinks about Cuil: "Cuil sucks". It also shows that Cuil is often misspelled as kuil or ciul.
The Register details that Cuil does not even know what its own name means.
The Cuil search engine shut down on 2010 Sep 17. All cuil.com domain were broken. All broken links have been removed.
Copyright © Tamura Jones. All Rights reserved.