CUIL not even luke-warm, here we go again
Jul 29, 2008 Search Engines
The next entry into the search marketing game is CUIL.com that promises to index and organize the greatest amount of pages online - more than Google, and more than Yahoo. With former Google engineers and executives at the helm, can they possibly eat away at Google’s search dominance?
You have to hand it to the guys and gals behind CUIL.com, because as far as search engines go, a mission statement goes a long way. Yahoo’s mission was to organize the online world in a massive directory, similar to a library. Google’s mission is to keep results simple and relevant. Mahalo’s mission is to target the top percentile of search queries and serve ‘top-quality’ user generated content with a social flare. The CUIL kids promise the most indexed pages anywhere, but is it enough?
At the end of the day, the one thing that search engines require is an engine that can deliver quality results. CUIL claims to bypass any kind of search algorithm such as quality score and pagerank calculations with content-driven ranking. They claim that the more pages they index, the greater wealth of information search users will have to find quality results. The problem is, most search engines rely on visitor feedback manifested in clickthrough to determine which content is quality and which is not. This is where CUIL falls short.
CUIL claims not to keep any user search information on record. With recent court involvement in seizing and analyzing search queries at Google and Yahoo, this seems to be the politically correct course of action. However, without some measure of analytics and visitor trending to weed out background noise, CUIL search results fall well short of the caliber of quality links both Google and Yahoo can provide. So, unless their claim of discrete data collection is marketing hooplah, they’ll have a hard time generating quality results pages that people will actually use.
Speaking of people… If it takes a village to raise a child than it will certainly take more than a few ex-Googlers to start a new engine. I’m not talking about insiders at CUIL, because to live and die as a search engine takes users, and lots of them. With Google’s commanding search dominance and household name notoriety, it will be difficult for anyone to overcome the challenge of barriers to entry in this field. People just don’t say “let’s search the internet” anymore, they “google” your name, your business, or even your own desktop computer.
So to the cool kids at CUIL, good luck!
Leave a Reply