Former Googlers fail to win over Google

By Christo Jacob | Thursday, 05 February 2009, 18:12 IST

Bangalore: There has been much hype about the yesterday's launch of Search engine Cuil, as the master minds behind it-three ex-senior Googlers- claimed a bigger index size (120 billion web pages) for Cuil than Google or any other search engine. So it was clear that the service of the new search engine will be compared to Google from day one. And the way they will be compared is index size and, more importantly, relevance/ranking of results. But when Siliconindia team gave some search queries on Cuil (www.cuil.com), it didn't appear to have the depth of results that Google has, despite their claims. And the results are not nearly as relevant. However Cuil is an excellent search engine, as it is only an hour old and have time to outwin its competitors. Another review says that while a search for Dog returned 280 million results on Cuil Google returned 498 million results. Google returned Wikipedia as the first result, then dog.com, while Cuil returned Dog.com. Wikipedia was not listed on the first page of results. It seems pretty clear that Google's index of web pages is significantly larger than Cuil's unless we're randomly choosing the wrong queries. Based on the queries above, Google is averaging nearly 10 times the number of results of Cuil. And Cuil's ranking is not as good as Google's based on the pure results returned from both queries. But Cuil's area of excellence is with the related categories, which return results that are extremely relevant. It does a good job of guessing what user will want next and presents that in the top right widget. That means Cuil saves time for more research based queries. Cuil was founded by a group of search pioneers, including Costello, who built a prototype of Web Fountain, IBM's Web search analytics tool, and his wife, Anna Patterson, the architect of Google's massive TeraGoogle index of Web pages. Patterson also designed the search system for global corporate document storage company Recall, a unit of Australia's Brambles. The two are joined by two former Google colleagues, Russell Power and Louis Monier. Previously, Monier led the redesign of ecommerce leader eBay's search engine and was the founding chief technology officer of two 1990s Web milestones, AltaVista and BabelFish, the first language translation site.

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