{"id":4659,"date":"2008-07-30T13:04:00","date_gmt":"2008-07-30T11:04:00","guid":{"rendered":""},"modified":"2008-07-30T13:04:00","modified_gmt":"2008-07-30T11:04:00","slug":"nothing-cool-about-cuil","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/internet\/4659-nothing-cool-about-cuil.html","title":{"rendered":"Nothing cool about Cuil"},"content":{"rendered":"

Earlier this week a number of ex-Google engineers launched Cuil<\/a>, a search engine proclaimed to be the next big Google challenger. The hype surrounding the launch of Cuil (pronounced cool) was so large that for a couple of hours the site went down under the weight of all the attention. Not an auspicious start for anyone wanting to take on Google. <\/p>\n

Outages aside, there are a number of reasons Cuil is unlikely to succeed in knocking Google from its perch. <\/p>\n

For a start, there is that name. The company claims the word Cuil is Gaelic for "knowledge", although there can be other interpretations. Either way it is a sad excuse for a name. None but a handful of Irishmen will ever work out that Cuil is actually pronounced "cool". Which puts a damper on future marketing. <\/p>\n

Of course, names are not everything. A search engine is about results and indexing as much of the Internet at possible. Cuil claims to be the world’s biggest search engine with "121,617,892,992 web pages" indexed at last count. The problem here is that there is considerable duplication in Cuil’s results so, while being a big number it doesn’t actually mean a lot. <\/p>\n

For example, doing a search for my own name (as one does, occasionally) turns up at least five references in the first two pages of results to a single email I wrote to a mailing list in 2004, each with their own unique URL. The same is true of other references. Cuil may well claim to index massive numbers of pages, but at this rate only a fifth of them might be worth anything. <\/p>\n

Then there is the issue of pictures that, occasionally, accompany results. Again, a search for my own name returns a number of results, some with pictures. The one for "Geek of the Week" has a picture of a someone I neither look like nor know. And the reference to my, now defunct, magazine on open source software has a picture of two cricketers!<\/p>\n

Worse, two of the references to a Namibian OSS developers’ conference I was involved in have a picture of a small child and what looks like a politician and a policeman. Again, neither of these are me. Even more strange is that fact that neither of these pictures appear on the pages referenced by Cuil, so it is anyone’s guess as to where they sourced the pictures.<\/p>\n

And then there is the algorithm. I’m no expert in building algorithms but it seems to me that what is important in search engines is to have the most useful information up front and the lesser information further down. <\/p>\n

In Cuil’s case it seems relatively arbitrary how things are organised. For the best part of eight years I have written almost daily for my own website, Tectonic. I have also written for countless other publications but Tectonic represents the single largest repository of my work to date. Which makes it strange that Cuil barely mentions Tectonic in the first couple of pages of results.<\/p>\n

But it does dredge up some other peculiar references. A link on a university’s "Mac Resource Page" to a story I wrote two years ago is given almost the same weight as my own site which carries my name on almost every one of its thousands of pages.<\/p>\n

Google by comparison throws up not only multiple references to Tectonic but also to my LinkedIn and Facebook Profiles as well as links to MyBroadband articles and ITWeb articles I have written and other organisations I have been involved in.<\/p>\n

I’m fully in favour of a decent Google competitor. But a badly named, poorly executed search engine is not going to deliver the goods. Even worse, Cuil does a fine job of reminding us just how good Google actually is.<\/p>\n

Google versus cuil – give your views<\/strong><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Google search challenger does doesn't deliver the goods<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_sma_x_autopost_status":"idle","_sma_x_autopost_error":"","_sma_x_post_id":"","_sma_x_attempts":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[18],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4659","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-internet"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4659"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4659"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4659\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4659"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4659"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4659"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}