Blogs

There has been a LOT of buzz about Cuil (pronounced ‘cool’) – a brand new search engine. Unlike MSN / Yahoo / AskJeeves etc, it does not share any of the underlying technology with other search engines, and maintains entirely its own database of webpages. Apparently their database is multiples larger than Googles, and in fact, several of the key employees are from Google.

The media has been blasting Cuil as fizzling out on its launch day. Technical problems plagued the results pages – often replying with ‘No results found’ (which 99% of the time is rediculous). I can certainly forgive this type of problem on launch day as they figure out how to scale properly to the load. What is less forgivable are the lack of relevance in search results. Google has become quite good at filtering out the spammers and link-hoarders from SERPS. When I searched for ‘ajax grid‘ I got mostly shareware download sites (wrong!) all forwarding to the same 2 products.

A secondary issue is how the URL’s for search results are quite small and out of the way. I usually focus my attention on the URL as opposed to the page title – mainly because it helps me filter out the junk from the gems quickly.

I’m always willing to try something new, and I’ll definitely come back to Cuil after a few months – but they definitely need to address relevance in their SERPS. The good thing about search engines is that switching costs are ziltch so there are opportunities out there for people who want to compete – like Cuil. They would, however, join a long list of utter failures when it comes to the search space.

I was also thinking, one way for them to get a foothold maybe in the search space would be to sell a Google-appliance like device that competes favourably on features for enterprise search. My experience there tells me there are opportunities if they can compete on features and price – even if their SERPS’s are still being improved.

I felt lucky to get on the Viewzi preview invite list. You can too if it hasn’t launched by the time you read this. Viewzi is a search aggregator that tries to present search results in an innovative and user-friendly way. This is achieves quite well, in my opinion, having studied a few other attempts at this over the years (snap.com, nexplore.com). Here is a summary of my experience on Viewzi today.

Launch Page

Nice and simple. I like the invitation to watch the training video. However, then I went to see it in Internet Explorer 8 (running in IE7 mode) and the whole thing went to hell (see screenshot below)

I was also treated to a JavaScript error. Next, I was curious about the footprint of this launch page. I opened up FireBug and watched the download. This page is 113kb, which in my opinion is too much for a search launch page. I recognize that nobody on a dial-up connection would ever use this site to begin with – fair enough, but under high-load conditions this is going to be an expensive page to serve and probably a slow page to download. Certainly when compared to the 12KB of utilitarian sparseness of Google.com. Anyway, the page did in fact come up very quickly for me so I probably shouldnt complain.

Test-Search “U2″

I tried searching for the band “U2″ and was presented with this results-browsing view. First off – it looks great, and the UI is really smooth and intuitive. However, this was not a search-results page. I think I should have been shown search results right away – as a jumping-off point for browsing these other views. Note: If you DO click on a search results view, further searches are immediately presented in this view.

In general I was impressed with the overall speed of everything. Search aggregators have a rep for being sluggish. I didn’t get that impression here.

Next I started exploriing the different views. Since U2 is a band, I was curious what results the MP3 view would produce:

These were all U2 songs and I could play then directly from the viewzi window. Nice! The other day myself and Mike Han were talking about 90’s rock and we wanted to hear some Nirvana. This would have been great.

Next I clicked on the ‘celebrity photos’ view to see if there were any Bono mugshots.

No mugshots, but these were mostly all relevant. The question is what can I actually do with these results? Normally when I’m searching for images I want them to download. for use in some graphic I’m putting together. This isn’t the view for that, but fortunately there IS another photo view:

This is where Viewzi had search-relevance problems. None of these images were of U2. Oh well.

Back to the other results. Viewzi has traditional text-search results that aggregate Google and Yahoo (is that legal?). Anyway, they were spot on of course – and quite snappy. The other view that really caught my attention however was the Video search:

The video search aggregates a bunch of video services in a really cool browser that actually saves you a lot of time. To me this is one of the key strengths of a service like this.

Overall I’m really impressed with Viewzi. I think it had some search relevance issues with the images but I’m sure they’ll continue to work on that as they move towards release. I think what could really help Viewzi is if they in turn opened up their aggregation capabilities in the form of a set of API’s, and Widgets that other people can use on their sites in the way that Snap.com has done. I don’t think I’ll really switch over from google (not until they get their browser search widget to work) – but I’ll definitely be checking back to see how it evolves. In the meantime, I encourage you to check it out: viewzi.com