Not so cool?
http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/07/29/how-to-lose-your-cuil-20-seconds-after-launch/
Stealth search start-up Cuil (pronounced “cool”) launched its product on July 29th of this year, and was promptly subject to an angry backlash from its users. The start-up – founded by three former senior Google employees – claims to have an index size of 120 billion web pages (larger than that of Google’s, they say). On the day of its launch however, Cuil’s search results were not as rewarding. For example, a search for “Dog” resulted in 280 million hits on Cuil and 498 million on Google. Of course, quantity isn’t everything, but even in relevance, Google’s results were better.
The comparison to Google is but natural, since Google defines what search means to most of us today – search results that are relevant, but also photos, news articles, video files, etc. that complete the picture. It remains to be seen whether Cuil can offer a superior ‘universal’ search package to one that we’re already used to.
Relevant lectures: 21/22
Bob Glushko Said,
September 5, 2008 @ 6:33 pm
I find it impossible to imagine that a new search engine coming out of nowhere could out-perform Google. You’d have to be clever at crawling and indexing, but more than that, you’d need a billion dollars to build server farms so that you could match the performance Google gets from massive replication. And you couldn’t do in incrementally over 10 years as Google has — you have to do it overnight. What are these cuil turkeys thinking?
That said, I think it is relatively easy to outperform Google in a restricted domain or for a specific user segment, and in fact i’ll show some examples of that in my Monday 9/8 lecture.