Triumph of the Liams Part X: Cuil

    You may not have heard of Cuil before. They've actually only just opened up shop today. So what is Cuil... well, it's like Google, but different. It's a search engine built by former Google engineers, it even has a weird name like Google's top secret projects. Supposedly it's pronounced 'cool' which is mildly ironic, because the site is anything but cool.

    In every account of Cuil that I've read so far (zum beispiel) everyone seems to be quick to point out three things.

1. Cuil was built by four disgruntled Google employees.
2. The project is backed by $33 Million.
3. Cuil supposedly has more pages indexed than Google.

    What people aren't talking about, it seems, is that Cuil's search result pages pretty much copy Google's css file. Cuil does include images on their SERPs which is cool, I guess... but with the ad hoc nature of internet updates I think this is fairly short sighted feature, especially for search engines. But back to what is supposed to make Cuil so cool. The four people that created Cuil all used to be employed by Google, which looks good on a resume. These days Google has more than nineteen thousand employees, and not all of them are integral to the R&D of the search engine. Not only that but it's not like these people were around at the beginning of Google, most of them worked there for a short period two or three years back. I think people are giving these folks too much credit based on their resume alone. Think of if someone from Microsoft left the company to create a new operating system after having worked on Windows ME from 1999 to 2000. I doubt investors would be throwing money at his feet.

    Speaking of money, who would invest in a Google rival... I mean really? $33 Million is a lot of money, remember the Dot-com Bubble? I'm not saying this is the next Pets.com, but similarities to Lycos and Netscape could be drawn.

    How many pages is 120 billion anyways? This is the number claimed by Cuil at launch. This means that they say they've indexed more information than Google, potentially three times as much. So how easy is it to find what you are looking for on Cuil? Well, this site isn't listed... neither are any of the other domains I own. Don't get me wrong, I'm not sore that my pages aren't listed in Cuil, but it's the first thing I looked for. As someone who works closely with the search engine optimization industry, I think I know how to make a page get noticed. Apparently not though. So how about some more common searches. Let's say I want directions to the Free State Brewery... uh oh, looks like I'm shit out of luck. Ok, how about result for Google's wikipedia page, nothing again... You get the idea.

    Maybe Cuil is trying to trigger a shift in the way people search and look for shit online... you'd never know it if that were the case since all the reports on Cuil thus far are about how it's bigger and better than Google. I'm not convinced...