Cuil also pronounced as “cool”, the latest search engine offering is making big news today with their launch, they claim to be indexing 120 billion documents which is 3 times more than the 40 billion documents Google Indexes. But why are people calling it a Google Search killer?
We strongly disagree with those who feel that way. Michael Arrington from Tech Crunch echoes our feelings with the blog post talking about how Google Beats Cuil hands down in size and relevance.
Cuil has a really large index but does that matter? How many of you get to the 100th page of the search result? As for getting search results for relevant terms, we do think that many of the results are identical on both the search engines. So does that mean 120 billion of documents are going to give you the same results that 40 billions of document can?
We are not defenders for Google here, but Google Search has been the center of everything we do, getting stuck with things is not in our dictionary and it is because of the search results we have found using Google search.
Relevancy - Winner Google Search
Many of the searches we did returned similar if not better results on few of them were outright different, but as far as relevance goes we rank Google more higher than Cuil. For example for the search term “technology” we got totally different results, but from relevance point Google won.

From the two search results you can see the drastic difference, and also how different the search terms are in relevance. It would also be worthwhile to know that Google indexed more than 1 billion pages which is almost 9 times more than what Cuil has indexed. You can click on the images above to visit the search results in the respective search engines.
Categories or Related Searches - Winner Google Search
Cuil does have categorization in place, but how relevant are they, let us look at the search results for the term “technology” once again.
Well the results say it all, and you already know our verdict.
Longer Search Terms – Winner Google Search
Cuil does not seem to understand longer search terms too, let us show you a example of a fairly simple query we ran on Cuil and Google, in the query we used the search terms “installing ngnix on Ubuntu hardy”. We rate this as a fairly simple search term since we have used much more complex search terms on Google over time. You wouldn’t be surprised by now to know who lost, it was the one who indexes 120 billion documents.
Though Google only returned 6 results, the first result solves our problem. Now we are just starting out with some of the simpler terms (according to us), there are several such terms which do not fetch any results on Cuil.
Interface – Winner Google Search
Don’t even get us started with the interface, we were really surprised they chose black, agreed they are pronounced cool, but with search we mean business not coolness. The black definitely takes our eyes off the main search results and focusing is a bit of a problem. On the other hand, Google sports a plain interface no jazziness or coolness, only relevant search results.
Though many of you may say that we have become used to the plain old interface, we would say yes we are, because we are only concerned about getting answers for our queries and not drooling over how good a search engine looks.
Summarizing
We won’t fall for the crap that it’s just launched, Cuil has been in the making for the past 2 years now, and that definitely is a long time to ponder upon several things we listed here.
If Cuil intends to poach users to start using their search engines, they will have to do much better job. We have nothing against the search engines, once they address the shortcomings we would be more than happy to give them a shot.
As a end user, we don’t really care what they do in the backend and how fast they index documents or how many documents they index, for us all that matters is the search results that answer our queries.
So the verdict from Techie Buzz for the new cool search engine is that, it’s in no way a Google search killer, in fact for us its not even in the competition.
Visit Cuil Search
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© Keith Dsouza for Techie Buzz, 2008. |
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