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.