07.29.08
Ex-Google Engineers Create New Search Engine
Some ex Google engineers have created a new search engine called CUIL (pronounced “cool”). The domain is www.cuil.com. Their goal – to create a bigger, badder search engine that can rival Google. I tried it out, and I have some thoughts about it. More after the jump.
Cuil uses the same preview graphic of the web sites in it’s index, like Ask.com does. So this part of it really isn’t new. What seems to be different about it, is its size – Cuil states that they contain over 121,617,892,992 web pages – much larger than Google’s number of indexed pages. I look at a lot of news sites each day and evening, and I sometimes look at Google news (news.google.com). The problem with Google news is that they basically pull in news headlines from around the world, and they massage the data a bit. After the announcement of Cuil on CNN and other news sites Monday, Google news had articles on it about how lame Cuil is. I really don’t trust Google that much anymore, so I decided to try out Cuil so that I could compare it against Google and Yahoo.
The first thing that you notice about Cuil is that their site is black, and there isn’t anything on it but a search box. The founders of the site are being tight-lipped about how it works, but just as we have reverse-endineered how google ranks sites, I am sure that over time we will be able to pull out some useful techniques to help sites come up high in Cuil (if it gets any traction).
The second thing that I noticed about the results I was seeing in Cuil is that when you add a local state name or place name to your search, there really isn’t a fair set of results that come up. When I added state names and area names to searches, what Cuil returned were mainly very cheezy directory sites. This is bad, and it could be easy for spammers to trick Cuil in this way by creating bogus directory sites. Some of these sites were obviously stuffed with keywords. For example, one search that I entered came back with many different results for the same web site, and that web site had made a page for every state name. Google would have been better at filtering that out, and that spam filtering is necessary to have a good search engine. So to sum this up, it looks like for right now, it will be incredibly easy to spam Cuil with some doorway pages, and old-school black hat SEO. But why would you want to do that, and get kicked out of Google? Cuil will need to work hard at getting lame directory sites out of its index. Who cares how many pages are in it if they are all lame?
Cuil – not ready for prime time
I really wanted to see more from Cuil, but I am not giving up hope for it yet. I want them to succeed because I want to see a viable alternative to Google. Something new that won’t be “evil” for a while. Cuil isn’t ready yet because there is no way to add a website to their engine. Also, as I said earlier, it appears that it would be incredibly easy to spoof Cuil and get sites to come up high, as I kept getting results that had blatant black-hat spamming techniques right in the body text of the websites coming up at the top of Cuil searches. Even a non-technical person could scan the results that Cuil spits out, and tell that the websites listed in the results were not trustworthy. It has that spammy aftertaste to the whole site when you look at the results.
Why Google has Become Evil
In my opinion, Google is about to start a long, painful decline. Some have said that this has already begun. Google’s stock price had a high of $714 per share in December 2007, and today their stock price is down to $483.11. That is an enormous drop. I think it still has a long way to go down. Why am I hating on Google? Because they are modifyng search results for each person that logs into Google, and that is bad news for your web site, for the web design industry, and for piracy. Here is how we discoverd it… A while ago, we started to notice that our search results in Google were changing if we were logged into Google, and if we weren’t logged into Google. We would have two computers in our office that were getting different search results for the EXACT SAME SEARCH in Google. If you use GMail, or Google Analytics, or any other “free” Google service, and you don’t log out of their site(s), then your next Google searches are tracked and altered to match your physical location and preferences. They are tracking who you are, what you search, and your results (and advertising) are then modifed to match your profile. I don’t like that at all.
Modified Google Search is bad for Ecommerce
It MIGHT sound like a good idea, but imagine trying to sell products to people around the country with an ecommerce site. Instead of showing sites that rank the best, Google might show the LOCAL sites that rank the best, when what you really wanted was a nationwide search for results. Once we realized this was happening, and we were able to duplicate it over and over again, I was convinced that the beloved Google is now in fact as evil as any other corporate behemoth that puts provits above customers.
Yahoo is now better than Google? Huh?
After seeing the privacy issues that Google is now presenting us, it caused us to go back and look more at Yahoo, and other search engines so that we could compare raw search performance and accuracy. The result was surprising – Yahoo had much better and more accurate results for just about every search we did. And believe me, I am no Yahoo fan. I haven’t used their site in a loooong time. Pretty much since Firefox put a Google search box in the upper right hand corner. So I decided to make Yahoo my default search in Firefox for a couple of weeks, and see if it works better for me. I’ll let you know how that goes. 
So try out Cuil.com, do some searches, and let me know what you think!
Digg it
| del.icio.us
| Furl
| reddit
Permalink
