Cuil is, for want of a convenient acronym, YASEATEG, which stands for Yet Another Search Engine Aiming To Eat Google. Google has over 60% of the search market, Yahoo! has less than half that and Microsoft is about a fifth of Google. If anyone could find a way to eat Google, then clearly there’s a lot of Google to go round. But if eating Google was easy, then Yahoo and Microsoft would have chomped it to pieces long ago, rather than suffer from search engine anorexia
I’ve looked at other attempts to eat Google. One recent attempt was Powerset, which looked promising until Microsoft bought it. Microsoft is the place where search engine technology goes to die. I think we should all pay our respects.
I remember getting a little excited by Cha Cha some time ago, but that was when it was in beta. It’s changed its approach and now is a search capabiity that you ask direct questions to (from a mobile phone if you want). For example you could ask “Where is the best place to get a burger in downtown San Francisco?” or “Why do cows have four legs?” or “Why is it that Cha Cha is never going to compete with Google?”
Other YASEATEGs include Wikia, the attempt to prove that aggregating human searches will create a better search resource. Wikia has a rolling count of all the searches it has done and it’s up over 2 million, which means it’s not heavily used yet. Will it work? I don’t think so, but I might be wrong. Mahalo looked like a good idea. When you just find what you need human expert searchers will help you. I tried it, but I never continued using it. I’m not sure why, but in some senses it doesn’t matter. The point is that to be successful you have to get people to switch. That means getting people to alter their behavior permanently. Mahalo just didn’t happen to do that. I even bookmarked it in FireFox but I never click on the bookmark.
So the interesting question is; which new search capabilities have got me to use them. There are two:
For search I use myself as the test case. With Imagery I was looking for images (of works by Escher) and I decided that Imagery was better than Google’s image search. It isn’t better in terms of quality of results, because actually it uses Google’s image search, it just has a better interface. And since I started using Imagery, I’ve always used it. I was attracted to using it because its author was trying to implement interface
With Del.icio.us it is simply the fact that Del.icio.us is better at finding authoritative resources for information. Imho this is all that Wikia can hope to achieve, but Del.icio.us already does it, so why bother with Wikia.
So, Is Cuil Cool?
I don’t think that Google won the search wars because it provided better results. It’s true that there was a PR war and various claims from various search engines that they provided the most relevant infromation. I used to use Alta Vista in the dark ages before Google and I switched to Google because the interface was so clean.
Google’s interface is still very clean, but not as clean as it was. Cuil is taking the same approach. It’s interface is clean and it looks as though you get relevant results. I like the layout. I’ve therefore added Cuil to my browser and I’ll use it for a week just to see. I’ll let you know if I continue with it. But even if I do, I don’t think it signifies much of success for Cuil – it merely means that Cuil is not useless. People now use Google so habitually that changing the habit will involve a very long competitive struggle. Google has become very sticky.
