Cuil.com – Not so Cool
July 30, 2008
By: Jay Thompson
Author's Website: http://www.phoenixrealestateguy.com
Cuil.com, a new search engine, was released to much fanfare earlier this week.
Pronounced “Cool”, my initial findings were, well…. not so cool.
Cuil was founded by two former Google engineers (and another from IBM). Obviously these are very smart folks.
According to Cuil, their claim to fame is:
“Cuil searches more pages on the Web than anyone else—three times as many as Google and ten times as many as Microsoft.
Rather than rely on superficial popularity metrics, Cuil searches for and ranks pages based on their content and relevance. When we find a page with your keywords, we stay on that page and analyze the rest of its content, its concepts, their inter-relationships and the page’s coherency.”
Well let’s just take a peek at their search returns…
A search for “Real Estate Blog” returns some well known and regarded real estate blogs. But in seventh position (out of 1.7M results) we’re presented with the New York Times blog, The Walk-Through. Now some might argue that a NYT blog should be highly ranked. But consider this — the last post on The Walk-Through was in September of 2006. And it was a post about the blog closing.
That’s the seventh most relevant real estate blog on the planet?
A search for “Phoenix Real Estate” returns 250 results (Google returns 1,980,000). My own blog shows up on page 1 of the results — no argument there 
but the exact same entry for my blog also shows up on page 2. The site in the #1 position also shows up on page 3.
Call me confused.
A search for “Zillow” returns absolutely nothing. Contrast that with Google’s return of 5,220,000 results…
Whoops, never mind. I searched Zillow again and got 987,000 results.
One of Cuil’s “features” is an “Explore by category” box that is claimed to allow the searcher to find sites related to their search. Cool idea, but I don’t understand why when you search “Phoenix Real Estate” one of the categories offered is “Cities in Indiana”. Thinking maybe there is a Phoenix, Indiana, I click on the tab and am offered a choice of seven Indiana cities… nope, no Phoenix there…
A search for “U.S. home prices” returns no results. A search for “US home prices” returns in the #1 position, “Paper Mart Packaging Store” and the #2 position belongs to checkaprice.com, with the headline “Compare prices: UK shop deals, low cost, best value”.
Huh?
And finally, if you search “Cuil” on Cuil, the #1 result is for “Properties for sale in Cuil Mhuine, Ireland”. At least Google puts Cuil in the #2 position for a search on Cuil. (and news about Cuil is #1 on Google).
I think I’ll stop now…
- Stumble it!
- Categories: Gadgets, Websites
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Comments
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Dean on July 30, 2008 12:54 pm
They came out and admitted that they had problems the first day:
http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/07/29/no-bull-cuil-had-problems/
Drew Meyers on July 30, 2008 12:59 pm
I too was unimpressed when I tested it out yesterday — the results were less than stellar in my mind. That said, I do kind of like the way they return results with thumbnail photos to the user. But they need to return more relevant results for me to use it.
Debbie on July 30, 2008 1:17 pm
I had fun searching Toledo, OH Real Estate. Lots of irrelevent results. Sidebar: your Cuil logo up top is linking to a Spanish speaking porn site – culi.com. I hope my boss doesn’t check my sites visited today…:-)
The Harriman Team on July 30, 2008 5:44 pm
When I saw this post in my feed reader, Feedly, I clicked on the Cuil link after reading the post and was greeted by…an exotic dancer?? And a boring one to boot. Wow, the link was spelled culi.com, which appears to be an Italian porn site. Good thing the link here is correct, or some people might have been in for a surprise!
Jay Thompson on July 30, 2008 11:03 pm
Wowsa Cuil, Culi… those are too close for a bad typist like me!
Wonder if traffic to Culi has gone up?
Sorry about that Drew!!
Jeff in Hawaii on July 31, 2008 12:53 pm
“Cuil or Culi” What ever the name is. They claim to crawl more pages than Google and serve more relevant results. I think they have a long way to go before they can really claim that. The way they display their results is pretty messy too! Not very efficient use of space.
Karlonia - Power Quotes on August 4, 2008 2:47 am
Apparently Cuil was not quite ready for launch during the first day or two – many medium long tail queries did not return results at all, and even general queries returned way fewer results than they should have considering Cuil’s claims of having indexed so many pages already. They did improve somewhat afterward, however, and seem to be picking up more results and increasing relevance as more people have been testing out the engine.
In the long run, I hope they get things together and perform well enough to compete with the major search engines and then maybe do some advertising. I would like to see more serious competitors to Google in order to hold their power in check and encourage more transparency overall.