Jul
29
I remember back in 1997 everyone used either Lycos or Yahoo. The obligatory question back then was not if you “got online yet”, it was “Do you Yahoo?” and if you didn’t happened to know the answer to that question then you probably didn’t know what the Internet was all about. But then there were a few of us, who didn’t like Lycos nor Yahoo at all and instead, we liked HotBot. No, we actually LOVED HotBot. I mean, it was fast, cool, straight forward and it was designed by Jeffrey Veen. WHAT’S NOT TO LOVE?. Then in 1998 Lycos bought HotBot so we went back to square zero: you either had to use Yahoo, Lycos or HotBot by Lycos. Of course there were others like Metacrawler and Altavista, but they shared a minority of the traffic pie.
By early 1999 we were all “Googling” in (pretty much) the same interface and way we do today. So if you think about it, not much has changed since then, which I find funny and interesting enough to write a post about it. I mean, so much has changed since then, the way you listen to your music, the way you get in touch with your family, the way you carry your files (thank God for the extinction of the floppys), the way you take pictures and yet, the way we search for things on the Internet, is the same way we had almost 10 years ago only now instead of looking for news, we Google our ex-girlfriends, our future employees, the possible names for our kids and our chocolate cookies recipes.
So yesterday when I read about Cuil (pronounced “Cool”), it made me think about all those people who might not “get” or “like” Google (the de-facto search engine these days) the same way I didn’t “get” Lycos/Yahoo back in the old days. I was also surprised to know that there are still people who are investing time and effort into finding the next “sliced bread”.
The Internet has grown. We think it’s time search did too.
- Cuil Team
Founded by ex-Google engineers, Cuil claims to be the world’s biggest search engine, with around 120 billion indexed pages, which they believe it’s about 3 or 4 times the size of Google’s index, of course we will never know for certain since Google stop publishing their index many moons ago when they were in the vicinity of 8 billion.
Whether Cuil can dethrone Google or not is impossible to tell at this point, but I can already say that after using it briefly and comparing the same search results, the interface felt really comfortable. Must be the fact that I’m using a widescreen display or just the idea of getting a fresh breath of air, but putting next to each other Google showed me 5 results “viewport”, while Cuil allowed me to see 8 at the same time without having to scroll vertically.
I do agree with the early reviews that Cuil still needs a lot of work to do, but I’m sure they will eventually mature into something really interesting so I’ll just keep it on my radar.
One thing is for sure though: they will never turn their brand into a cool multi-language verb like Google did. Can you imagine someone actually saying: “I just cuil-er my room mate and I found out he’s a trekkie”
1
Well, definitely it can’t.
The interface is awesome, I agree but the results are like, MASSIVE CRAP !
Google is perhaps ugly but still 10 times (at least) more relevant than this is. To tell the truth even Yahoo is more relevant (I did my tests, hehe).
The number of indexed pages isn’t really important at this point, most of the time, the answer you want is indexed but lost somewhere in the results.
2
I agree that Cuil looks very Cool and the user interface feels awesome. But I don’t really like the way it is working right now:
They were supposed to launch on monday but the website only started working a few hours ago over here in the Netherlands;
When searching I get a lot of double results, page one and two showing the same search results;
Cuil displays images relating to the results found, so not always images that are actually on the found page. This could be a good feature as I was searching for someone and found their picture was shown in the results but not on the page itself, but sometimes Cuil gets it very wrong: When searching for my own homepage ‘ruudwelten.com’ I got an image of the ‘Florida Obstetric and Gynecologic Society’ ...;
Also Cuil produces a lot of search engine’s search results in it’s own results (get it?). Something I hate when looking for something in a search engine is being redirected to the results page of another search engine.
I hope they’ll fix things like that, untill then I’ll be using Google.
3
@Norswap Yes, it is true, I guess I was focusing more on quantity than quality. I wonder what this ex-Google cats have under their sleeve though…
@Ruud Welten Florida Obstetric and Gynecologic Society??? LOL!! Come to think about it, maybe you should establish it as a side gig… for the weekends.
