Wednesday, July 30, 2008

CUIL Slays Google


CUIL, the Google Slayer
CUIL, a new search engine, launches on July 27, 2008. It is said to have the potential of becoming the Google Slayer, boasting its 120 billion indexed pages. Google only has 40 billion. But that's not the whole story.

Size, does it matter?
Google responds that they know over a trillion web pages, however, they know better than to index all of those. Google filters through these pages and indexes only quality pages. It throws away garbage content such as SPAM, search engine scraped content, as well as duplicate content.

Quality and relevancy is more important
Instead of size, quality is important. This is measured by the relevancy of search results to your query. When you're searching for something, does the search engine deliver what you're looking for in the least amount of clicks and the least amount of time? Danny Sullivan does a simple test on CUIL's relvancy and describes it on this article.

Results in three columns
The way CUIL displays its results in columns can be quite annoying if you're used to the top to bottom style of displaying search results. It feels like looking for info on the news paper. I don't know where to start, and where to proceed next. Which is more relevant among these results? Obviously the first one on the top most and the left most, but then what?

Images with search results
CUIL displays its results with images. This means it takes more time and bandwidth to load the page for each search query. In some cases, the images displayed are not related to the search query.

CUIL and the Search Market
CUIL has the potential to compete with Yahoo, MSN, Lycos, AllTheWeb, or other search search engines, but as of now, it'll have to have more unique and useful features than the size of their index before they can topple down search engine giant, Google.

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