Cuil

A new search engine named Cuil (pronounced "cool") debuted last week, to much fanfare, with articles heralding its launch from the AP, Reuters, Time, Newsweek, BBC News, The New York Times, and more. (Someone give that PR person a raise!)

Cuil claims the to have largest index and most relevant results, and boasts a team of search industry veterans with impressive resumes, including two former technical leads at Google, the founding CTO of AltaVista, and the original developer of IBM's WebFountain. Of note to privacy enthusiasts, it does not log any IP addresses or keep any users' search histories.

I decided to try it out on its launch day to see how it stacked up against my — and millions of others' — go-to search engine, Google.

I first "cuiled" (doesn't have quite the same ring to it as "Googled") my own name, being the self-centered egomaniac that I am. While Cuil did return one relevant result, the rest of the results had nothing to do with me. It did not find, for example, the site with my name in the domain name. Google, on the other hand, not only finds all of my personal websites, but finds a number of sites that mention me and my similarly-monikered brethren.

Maybe my first test was too difficult. I next decided to search for something much more popular. To my surprise, my query for "iPhone" turned up — wait for it — the Linksys iPhone!

Cuil was helpful enough to know that I might be looking for "Apple iPhone", but when I chose that tab, none of the results on the first page were from Apple's official site, and most were spammy links that weren't useful at all.

I then tried another popular search of the moment: "The Dark Knight". Finally, Cuil returned very relevant results on the first page, including links to the film's official sites (U.S. and Canadian), its Wikipedia entry, and some of its viral marketing sites (Why So Serious?). It also provided a good example of the "Explore by Category" box:

A few more searches of popular terms turned up similarly relevant results on the first page, though there were enough shady sites alongside them to make me suspicious.

Again, though, despite its claims about index size, I found Cuil's depth to be lacking. For example, my search for something at which I couldn't stop laughing that day, "horse backflip":

Google, for the same query, turns up over a million results, including direct links to corresponding online videos, and not just those from YouTube.

I can imagine that a decent percentage of web searches are for Warez and pr0n, and while I didn't really delve into this area, I've (ahem) heard that, there too, Cuil comes up short (har har).

Perhaps the most accurate result returned by Cuil during my testing (since fixed), is for the word "cuil" itself:

At least Cuil, the search engine, was honest enough to know that it isn't yet relevant.