Sat 2 Aug 2008
Google Beats Cuil Hands Down In Size And Relevance, But That Isn’t The Whole Story
Posted by Robin Bal under News[6] Comments
Search engine Cuil launched earlier this evening, claiming a bigger index size (120 billion web pages) than Google or any other search engine. The pedigree of the founders and execs, which includes three ex senior Googlers, means the service will be compared to Google from day one. And the way they will be compared is index size and, more importantly, relevance/ranking of results.
We’ve been testing the engine for the last hour. Based on our test queries Cuil is an excellent search engine, particularly since it is all of an hour old. But it doesn’t appear to have the depth of results that Google has, despite their claims. And the results are not nearly as relevant.
A search for Dog returns 280 million results on Cuil and 498 million on Google. Judging relevance of results is subjective, but Google returns Wikipedia as the first result, then dog.com. Cuil returns Dog.com, wikipedia isn’t listed on the first page of results. Both are meaningful results, but Google is better.
More searches, Cuil v. Google: Apple (83 m v. 571 million) – neither mention the fruit. France (102 m v. 1.5 billion) – Cuil’s category refinement makes their results better for this query. Stonehenge (800k v. 8.5 million). Silicon Valley (3.2 m v. 24 m). Techcrunch (600k v. 6.5 m).
Read
It seems pretty clear that Google’s index of web pages is significantly larger than Cuil’s unless we’re randomly choosing the wrong queries. Based on the queries above, Google is averaging nearly 10x the number of results of Cuil.
And Cuil’s ranking isn’t as good as Google’s based on the pure results returned from both queries. Where Cuil excels is with the related categories, which return results that are extremely relevant. With Google, we’ve all gotten used to trying a slightly different search to get the refined results we need. Cuil does a good job of guessing what we’ll want next and presents that in the top right widget. That means Cuil saves time for more research based queries.
And I want to reemphasize that Cuil is only an hour old at this point, Google has had a decade to perfect their search engine.
Source – Techcrunch
August 2nd, 2008 at 2:21 pm
[…] Original Fortune Watch […]
August 3rd, 2008 at 4:58 pm
Though Cuil is very young, they got off to a terrible start. I blame them for hyping their product which crashed and didn’t work properly when accessed.
Irrelevance is the key difference between Cuil and Google. Cuil is still serving up quite a few wrong photographs with their returns, a distinction that is making this search engine look awful.
August 4th, 2008 at 5:52 pm
Hi Robin, finkx off Digg here!
I do like Cuil a little…
But is too infected by spam – and had failed to index numerous of my sites which had plenty of inbound links.
Also I think the colour scheme is a bad idea. White writing on black background is bad for your eyes.
Best Wishes,
Colin
August 5th, 2008 at 12:36 pm
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August 20th, 2008 at 1:25 pm
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August 25th, 2008 at 2:32 am
I know that Cuil is in its “infancy” but damn, it should be a lot more refined if it is going to claim to be a “Google killer” already. Just a simple search for the programming language “COBOL” yields no results. If you actually make the search for “cobol language” the first result is a dead link. That is just one broken search out of many. I have to admit, the random gay porn is pretty hilarious. And the guy with his head in someone’s vagina for a LOLCAT search, that’s just golden. Anxiously awaiting a good “theonion.com” article on Cuil…