Cuil, the Internet’s newest Search Engine appears to be taking a bit of a battering as everyone and his dog takes a shufty at what has been described as ‘new technology that can change the competitive dynamics of the Web search market’.
What that means is that some clever ex-Google employees have developed what they claim to be a more efficient Search Engine than Google, capable of indexing faster and more cheaply, a far larger portion of the Web than the world’s number one.
Reuters said: “The would-be Google rival says its service goes beyond prevailing search techniques that focus on Web links and audience traffic patterns and instead analyzes the context of each page and the concepts behind each user search request.”
If this is true it’s a significant difference to Google and as anyone involved in optimising web pages (SEO) can tell you, it’s the concept of ‘relevance’ based on quantity of links that often proves the most difficult to address, and possibly the reason why results are often filled with affiliate-driven ‘price comparison’ sites.
Maybe Cuil will tip the balance back toward actual content and away from the SEO-merchants? Whatever the outcome I’ll watch this with as much interest as I watched Google when it launched, taking on the then dominant Alta Vista.
Go and take a look, but be prepared to see the following message (at least until they get more servers put in):
“We’ll be back soon…
Due to overwhelming interest, our Cuil servers are running a bit hot right now. The search engine is momentarily unavailable as we add more capacity.
Thanks for your patience.”
This entry was posted by Peter Jackson on Monday, July 28th, 2008 at 2:57 pm and is tagged with Cuil, Google, SEO and is posted in the category Tech News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
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Sadly at the top of page 1 is The Register email deletion story from 2006 and there's even a story from 2004 about Insight selling out. How can a 4 year old financial story be classed as relevant by any human standard?
Interesting, but Cuil has a long way to go before I'd switch from Google!
Just read the story on wired about this. Here
Can't see anything worth while in this new search engine. The best they can hope for is to be bought out. If they ever did get big, the spammers would kill it. As far as I can see, there is no mechanism to get rid of spam. It's easy to write a page of 'content' but much harder to get a link.
I'm pleased to say I've not seen the 'unavailable' notices since the 'launch' day. Coverage of this engine was universal across the tech media though so it's not surprising that it got hammered as everyone tried it at the same time.
Hate it tbh. Hate the layout and the results are useless.
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