Searching might just be cool again

Google's new rival

Or Cuil, as the case may be.

Looks like Google may have competition on search front.

The question: Can a few ex-Googlers and something like $33 million kick-start a rival to Google?

Given that Anna Patterson, the internet’s foremost search engine rockstar, is on the case, that is very likely. Of course, even with $33 million dollars, Cuil is the equivalent of a tiny little yappy dog who’s trying to punk off some enormous American Bulldog.

What the Cuil team is trying to do is have more results returned, return them in a better way, and index them with images and columns. The idea is sound an in direct contrast to Google’s focus on popularity as a relevance indicator.

Some Problematic Issues

There are problems, of course. As expected with any significant change, the results returned are, well, different. There’s going to be a great deal of status quo competition to overcome. More significant problems involve the indexing itself. As of this writing, a search for “Google market share” returns a number of appropriate results, but in the “Search by category” sidebar it inexplicably lists entries for cola (yeah, the softdrink). I initially assumed that these entries would be related to, say, the comparison of Google’s search market share to Pepsi’s cola market share. I was wrong, however, because the categories are strange, untold cola’s from China and Denmark.

One of the coolest things that the Cuil team has done is to give us images in the search results. Like any primate, I love sparkle and pretty pictures and my eyes tend to zoom right into those pictures. Unfortunately, the images still don’t give me as much information as I want.

Correction: They don’t give the appropriate information. The screenshot above shows a NY Times link about Google’s market share, but the image is for a teen party flic called “Dorm Daze.” Now, I’m not going to complain about seeing scantily clad women scattered over my desktop throughout the day, but I will suggest that the image of a mindless teen movie is not necessarily going to help me decide whether that link is an appropriate representation of Google’s Market Share.

Interestingly, a Cuil search for “Dorm Daze” showed an images for “Christmas Vacation.” Admittedly, they are both National Lampoon films.

Still “A Good Thing”

Still and all, the idea of a worth rival to the megagiant is not as exciting as the innovation and change that it can bring. That Dorm Daze imaged New Your Times link states that Cuil has somehow found a way to index 80 billion more pages than Google, and do it on something like 140 machines. That’s simply incredible. Having raised about $33 million, they’ve only spent $7. That’s innovation. The problems I see amount to small bugs- nothing more than we would expect. Given that they’ve spent less than a quarter of what they’ve taken in, we’d hope there were bugs.

I won’t put in a plug about how much Joupla could accomplish with only $50, 000, however, the prospect of partnering with a company that is so focused on innovation is attractive. Joupla supports Cuil, and will use it and take advantage of their feedback links to help them improve as much as we can. Since our goals are the same- the best possible way to get information to those who need it- we can see no reason not too. In fact, we’d help more if we only knew how.

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