A new search engine is open for business. If you are tired of Page Rank,
bullying and excessive fees for advertising with Google, then Cuil (pronounced
COOL) is the search engine for you. Cuil founders claim they have indexed 120
billion web pages. This is 3 times more than any other search engine.
Visual differences include search engine results in columns. Images attached to
each result. More relevant data in the search results rather than just the
results that have the most money or best SEO techniques.
How Do You Include Your Site in Cuil?
If you try out Cuil then check to see if your web site is included. If not,
then you might want to send an email to them to have their
web crawling bot search your site. Personally, I think this is
rather archaic to send an email to them rather than having an online insertion
form. When I did my search on my site name, You Can Learn Series, they came up
with NO results. Searching on my URL, http://www.youcanlearnseries.com/
they found two references to my site. I sent them the requested email to have
my site crawled.
Why the Columns Instead of a List of Results?
Cuil claims that people prefer columns to a list of results. They liken their
results page to multicolumn newspapers and the Bible. I don't think I like the
columns. I started at 3 columns and then switched to 2 columns. I was looking
for a way to reduce it to 1 column, but no choice was available.
The columns made it difficult to follow the search results pattern in my
opinion. Were the results more relevant running left to right or was I supposed
to go down one column, return to the top of the page and then proceed down the
next column?
They also show images next to your search results. Interestingly, when I was
first using the search results page I saw the place holder for the images but
no images showed up. After I got to page 5 of the search results, I saw 2
images, but there were still 8 results with no images.
My original search on my URL showed 2 results and 2 images were displayed with
the result. The first showed an image of a cactus that I had on the home page
at one point in the last 3 months. The second result set was for an article on
body building on my site. For this page they showed a partial image of a
motorcycle that did not originate from my web pages. What is that all about?
The image was in no way relevant to my web site or the article. So, I don't
know what the purpose of the images are.
Why do We Need another Search Engine
We don't need another search engine, but in the world wide web there will
always be start ups that think they can do it better than the current players.
For those that think we don't need another search engine they are the same
people that said the same thing when Google first released.
Back in 1995
I am sure many people would have said the same thing about Google. We don't
need another search engine. We have
AltaVista, Open Text, Infoseek, Magellan, Yahoo and Excite.
These popular search engines have changed, been bought out by others or folded.
There is a good chance that over the next 10 years Google will be an also ran.
What's Different About Cuil?
Some of the things that Cuil brings to the search engine marketplace "is
organized and relevant results based on Web page content analysis." Google
does a lot of link analysis to determine their page rank algorithm. Cuil
depends less on linking analysis and more on page content analysis.
Cuil's team includes Anna Patterson from Google where she
"was the architect of the company's large search index and led a Web page
ranking team." Anna's husband Tom Costello researched
and developed search engines at Standford University and IBM.
Along with other former Google employee, Russell Power, they believe they have
built a "more efficient yet richer search engine from the ground up." Plus,
everyone is raving about their privacy policy which doesn't collect searcher's
personal data and searching habits.
Early Release Bugs???
I found that when I first tried to go to the FAQ, About us and News pages, I
received a page not found error. Then I tried it a few more times, and finally
on the 4th or 5th time they delivered the page as requested. I even tried a
search on "variegated fallopia" expecting a listing of sites offering
information about the perennial plant fallopia. Instead I received a search
error message. They definitely are still in the early stages of the business
and are experiencing growing pains.
Not Ready for Prime Time
I don't know if Cuil is ready for prime time. But, I always like young
competing companies hungrily trying to bring down the big dogs like Google. So,
I hope that Cuil is able to deliver on their promise to be different and to
give us relevant results. Hopefully, their results will include your blog and
my site.
|