Will Cuil be a Cooler Search Engine Than Google?
A new search engine launched Sunday. It’s called “Cuil” (pronounced “Cool”) and it’s supposed to be bigger, faster, and better than Google.
How cool will Cuil be, and how much of a challenge will it be to Google? We’ll have to wait a little longer to answer that question, but it’s worth remembering that it’s hard to change behavior generally, specifically among a generation that thinks “Google” is a verb.
It’s also fair to say that no other search engine has come close to entering the public consciousness like Google, so Cuil has its job cut out. But as Sunday was but day one, it’s also worth remembering it took time for Google to triumph over Alta Vista and Yahoo in the search engine wars.
We played with Cuil, and it was, well, pretty cool. The big difference between Cuil and Google is apparently its ranking system. According to Cuil, they rank pages according to content relevance rather than Google’s approach of assigning priority based on inbound links. Cuil is definitely cooler than Google in how they display search results, which are automatically put into columns, with results categorized by topic and sub-topic. They also display images from Web results, so the search results pages are much more arresting than Google’s.
But it’s one thing to have a nice interface and another to offer users good results. The size of the Web index the engine has access to matters a lot. But “Extras” matter too, and Google has Maps, Image Search, and desktop search, while Cuil doesn’t (yet).
Cuil says that it is launching with 120 billion indexed pages, which is well over the 40 billion they say Google has. Google neither commented on Cuil, nor did they disclose the size of its own index, but in an e-mailed statement said they maintained “the largest collection of documents searchable on the Web” and welcomed all competition.
But whether you are talking digital or analog, products or services, bricks or clicks, competing with the ideal that consumers themselves set for the category is ultimately the best yardstick. And search as we may, we haven’t found anything that correlates better with consumer engagement or loyalty or profitability than that.
Robert Passikoff is founder and president of Brand Keys.
