It's cool to be Cuil today. Cuil Inc. launched their new search alternative to Google today. Cuil pronounced Cool has received lot's of press today and it helps when it's in the right places. And if it we're not for the fact that the principals have a history of producing value add to existing search products like Google search, then this roll out would be hardly noticed.
But the fact that they have a track record, worked at Google and are boasting that they have an index bigger than Google, is newsworthy. Cuil is led by Anna Patterson a former engineer at Google. Along with her husband Tom Costello, a search expert in his right, Cuil aims to take on Google. No small feat.
But having a bigger index doesn't mean you're better. And only time will tell if they have what it takes to carve out a piece of the big search pie. They claim to be able to search across 120 billion web pages compared to an estimated 40 billion Google has. Google officially does not reveal how many pages it indexes but others sources suggest that they keep an index of around 60 billion pages. As well Google says that not all of the pages it crawls are indexed because many are duplicates. Working in this industry I can concur that there is a lot of duplicate content out there.
For Cuil to take some market share away from Google it will take more than the boasting of a bigger index. Reality is, with enough hardware and money a startup can build an index that is big, even huge as Cuil has. The test of whether Cuil can succeed will be if the public and business users find more relevant search results through Cuil. Being as big or fast as Google is not enough. You have to be able to change people's search preferences. And that's not easy.
What is noteworthy is that Cuil says they've developed a faster, better way to index pages and just as important use less hardware. Less hardware is important as the cost to index, store and serve up results can be prohibitive. The ongoing downward costs of hard drives, CPU's etc. helps. However even though RAM prices have come down, the price of RAM still is one of the most expensive aspect of creating a searchable index.
In my initial tests of Cuil I was both pleased with the results and disappointed. Some common searches resulted in no results. I'll attribute that to first day bugs. But I also found that sources like Wikipedia were heavily weighted, sometimes in favor of the actually site that I was looking for.
It's public day 1 for Cuil and they have people's attention. Let's see if they can keep it and build some momentum. In the meantime I'll give them a try and report back with my thoughts in the near future.