Does Cuil Need To Take Search Engine 101 Classes?
Cuil - an all new general-purpose search engine has just launched. Mike Arrington over at Techcrunch has all the details (see “Cuil Exits Stealth Mode“). Obviously, you can check out Cuil yourself, to make up your own mind whether or not it’s a Google-killer. I checked it out, and it made me wonder if, talented as the Cuil team obviously is, they failed their Search Engine 101 classes. Why? Well, what is the single most important test of any new search engine? It’s this: does the new search engine return results that are more useful than Google’s?
Please hold me to this standard when we launch our search-engine, Togalo. If Togalo doesn’t return better results than Google, then, in my book, we deserve to fail. In my tests today, the truth is that Cuil returned results that were much worse that Google’s. But wait, you say! They’ve only just launched! Give them a chance! Well, I’m sure they have the finance to keep developing, so they will have the opportunity to get better.. However, the fact is that when Google launched, it was pretty comprehensively better than the competition. I remember well the first time I first tried Google. At the time, Alta Vista was my search engine of choice. The very first time I tried Google I was blown away by how great the results it returned were. I switched from Alta Vista to Google in an instant. After trying Cuil, I’m going to stick with Google for the time being.
I wish the guys luck - they’re trying to compete with Google head-on, which is no small undertaking. The prize is that, if they can beat Google on search relevance, they could take big chunks of search market share. The challenge is that they need to significantly improve their technology, if they have any hope of succeeding. They’re not alone in that, by the way. Every time I see an interview with a senior figure in Microsoft’s search team, they say - “Now, our search is on a par with Google’s”. Then, I go try it, and find it’s still much, much worse. Having said that, to be fair to Microsoft, it’s clear that the overall leadership of the company understands only too well that they need to improve their search offering.
Is this stuff really so difficult to understand? It sure seems like it sometimes…
Cuil enters the fray | Ugh!!'s Greymatter Honeypot on 28 Jul 2008 at 8:00 pm
[...] from people claiming it’s a great new search engine, to others who feel there’s still some way to go. Thing is, the number of people trying it out has meant some serious scaling issues have come to [...]