http://www.cuil.com
This was BBC World’s first question just now. In the heat of the camera’s glare, I said ‘Well yeah, it is pretty cool’. I wish now I’d said: ‘Well if you think search engines are cool… ‘ but after time to cogitate I think there seems to be only one thing that Cuil does better than Google, which is the way it offers categories of search results based on your query. So ‘insurance’ brings up tabs that say ‘home insurance’, ‘auto insurance’ etc.
This obviously deals better with situations where the search term hasn’t been specific. But it’s also a feature that you feel Google could easily integrate if it sees it’s what users want, so, if that’s its USP, then a Google-beater it is not.
Refined search
I then tried the classic ‘fencing’ search. A traditional search engine can’t know whether you mean fences, the sport of fencing or handling stolen goods. On Google, you’ll get the top two (obviously not enough out there about hawking contraband) mixed up in the results. Cuil does the same but makes a better go of offering choice to the user by, again, grouping results in categories. Unfortunately, this still chiefly means refining the search further – it offers sub-tabs with ‘garden fencing’, ‘industrial fencing’ etc. So it kind of fails this test just as any results not based on my past behaviour would.
The Cuil site is down again as I write, which is something of a worry I suppose, but it’s chief concern is that there appears to be no great difference between how it finds and ranks sites compared with Google – at least not like Delicious, for example. Surely a Google-beater will emerge from something based on mapping user behaviour and/or social bookmarking services rather than an improved method of grouping or displaying results?
Google’s achilles heel
Anyway, it’s vaguely Cuil/cool to think about. Google’s obvious achilles heel is that it still entirely relies on being the most used search engine. If that shifts it has still to develop anywhere else to go – hence probably great concern about its inability to monetise YouTube well.
This reminds us why else Cuil bears little comparison initially – it doesn’t allow you to search by different format (video, images etc.). Of course it will get better as users help refine the results and index more pages. But it’s hard to think that Google will not be able to respond to any advances it makes.
Filed under: Search, web 2.0 Tagged: | Cuil, Delicious, Google
