Wired was gushing about the well-pedigreed Cuil general purpose search engine, live today, which aims to knock Google off its perch at the top of the search engine heap.
I had to try it out, and the first impression, which was visual, was good. The interface looks visually more like a three-column newspaper than the familiar stack of links.
Ciel claims to be “the world’s biggest search engine” It says it “searches more pages on the Web than anyone else—three times as many as Google and ten times as many as Microsoft.” Dem’s fighting words, man, so the GoogleGazer needed to put Cuil to the test.
It failed.
A search engine should be timely and comprehensive, and ought try to understand your query and offer meaningful results.
With great humility, the GoogleGazer first searched Cuil for the obscure. He typed GoogleGazer as his first search argument. Cuil claimed 32 results and displayed only nine, While it alleged to put the GoggleGazer’s home page at the top of the list, it actually linked to an obscure broken proxy link “http://www2.riccruz.com:83/proxy/index.php?q=aHR0cDovL2dvb2dsZWdhemVyLmNvbQ==” . In contrast, Google listed the GoogleGazer’s home page first, along with 551 citations all of which were viewable and relevant.
While this flattered the GoogleGazer’s ego, he, ever the dispassionate scientist, next decided to test something timely and in the news. The GoogleGazer hunted and pecked in “Obama Wall Note Prayer” as a search argument, having in mind Senator Obama’s visit to the Wailing Wall and his leaving a prayer note there that was subsequently stolen and made public. Cuil had but one hit, and it was a “miss.” The best it could do was offer an article from the Daily News about Obama running ahead of McCain in the polls. In contrast, Google had dozens of relevant stories leading with the Los Angeles’ Times story “Obama Western Wall prayer note is filched.”
So far so bad.
Time to do a little little real research. The GoogleGazer is looking into Tulipmania, the speculative tulip bubble that peaked around 1636. In Tulipmania: Money, Honor, and Knowledge in the Dutch Golden Age (2007), Anne Goldgar, who teaches at Kings College in London University, has debunked the accepted wisdom that these bulbs changed hands hundreds of times in a single day, and that some bulbs, sold and resold for thousands of guilders, never even existed. Tulipmania has been seen as an example of the gullibility of crowds and the dangers of financial speculation. If fact, “most of what we have heard of [tulipmania] is not true,” Ms. Goldgar proves. In a search for Tulipmania, Cuil did a little bit better, but not much. It led with a short blog review by Steve Goddard of Ms. Goldgar’s book. Google led with a comprehensive Wikipedia article and then an in-depth overview and book review from Business Week. Neither of these made it to Cuil’s first page.
An important element in Google’s ranking is how often the source is referred to by others, on the assumption that citations are a good predictor of authoritativeness. Cuil says,
Rather than rely on superficial popularity metrics, Cuil searches for and ranks pages based on their content and relevance. When we find a page with your keywords, we stay on that page and analyze the rest of its content, its concepts, their inter-relationships and the page’s coherency.
Then we offer you helpful choices and suggestions until you find the page you want and that you know is out there. We believe that analyzing the Web rather than our users is a more useful approach, so we don’t collect data about you and your habits, lest we are tempted to peek. With Cuil, your search history is always private.
Cuil is an old Irish word for knowledge. For knowledge, ask Cuil.
Ann Paterson, an ex-Google search engineer, backed by $33 million in venture capital, her husband, Tom Costello, and two other former Google engineers – Russell Power and Louis Monier – searched for better ways to search. From what the GoogleGazer has seen, they have some promising ideas but as Gartner Inc. analyst Allen Weiner was quoted as saying in Wired, “I doubt (Cuil) will be keeping anyone at Google awake at night.”
Filed under: Business, Cuil, Google, Microsoft, Technology Tagged: | and Knowledge in the Dutch Golden Age, Ann Paterson, Anne Goldgar, Barak Obama, Cuil, Google Search, Honor, Louis Monier search ranking, Russell Power, Tulipmania, Tulipmania: Money, Wailing Wall, Wired
