My first experience with Cuil, new pretender to Google’s throne

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So what is Cuil?

Cuil, a new search engine founded by some former Googlers, is getting a lot of press today. I heard about them on the radio this morning, and later saw them featured on cnn.com. So they’re making some noise.

There’s no shortage of search engines out there, all hanging on in spite of Google’s ever-increasing dominance of the game (~70% of search traffic these days). To stand up against Google, what trick does Cuil have up its sleeve? Well, the biggie is the claim that Cuil indexes 120 billion web pages, which they claim is around 3 times the size of Google’s index (all according to Anna Patterson as reported by cnn.com).

Taking Cuil for a spin

Well, let’s see how it works. I started by searching for something near and dear to me: me. Specifically, one of my copywriting specialties, which is education technology.

First, I ran a search in Google for “education technology copywriter.” The result:

There I am at number three. Not bad!

Now, my result using Cuil with the same search term, “education technology copywriter”:

Huh. Nada. Great. Addressing their possible reasons: no typos in the search, and all the terms are pretty common in the modern age. So maybe I used too many terms.

Too many terms? Well, I hope that’s not it because that will pretty much render this search engine useless. Isn’t it the whole point of a great search engine to be able to drill down to specific results using more finely tuned search terms? Use a specific term to get a specific result.

Maybe Cuil just isn’t interested in the long tail.

Okay, a more general search

Fine. Let’s pull back a bit. How about a search for “copywriter”?

Google:

Cuil:

So the Google search pulls up about 16 times the results of the Cuil search, in spite of Cuil’s claim to indexing more pages. The two companies clearly have different ideas on how to decide what a relevant result for a given search term is. At least the Cuil result suggests some alternative areas for exploration, including offering to find copywriters. Let’s take a closer look at that:

Ah, yes, the results include those famous copywriters Joseph Heller, Salmon Rushdie, and filmmaker Terry Gilliam. Huh? Okay, perhaps those folks did work as copywriters early in their careers (and they did, really), but they shouldn’t be returned as relevant results on a search for copywriters now, because they aren’t copywriters.

Overall take on Cuil

Well, I’m pretty unimpressed. Extra pages or not, the results are pretty bad for anyone doing any searches that might lead to me (or anyone copywriter with any specialty at all, it would seem).

I don’t agree with everything they do, but, for search, Google is still king and has little to fear from the newest pretender to the throne.