A Google Killer?
I came across an article on CNN.com titled "Ex-Googlers launch rival search engine." After reading it, I wondered, "is this a Google killer?"
The company is backed by $33 million in venture capital. They claim that they are indexing more than 120 billion web pages which is greater than Google’s 8.2 million (even though Google doesn’t publish how many they scan). Anyways, enough of the marketing muscle. I wanted to give it a try.
I did some comparative search results between Google and Cuil. I found that Google blows cuil away; however, your comparisons may differ.
Some examples:
I searched for an Oracle 600 error. Google found information, Cuil said no results found.
I decided something basic, so I searched for ".NET". Google brought up a list of results for Microsoft. Cuil said, results not found.
So I did a search of "cuil" on Cuil and guess what? It’s not self-aware! It can’t even find itself, so what makes me think it is capable of finding what I am searching for? This is not even a Google Killer. It’s a Cuil killer. It’s pretty bad when it kills itself.
So I tried a simple search. I searched for trees. BINGO! Cuil has plenty of information about trees. The problem with cuil is I can’t really use it, at least not yet. It has a long way to go to catch up with even Microsoft Live Search, much less, Google.
They spent $33 Million to build this? Alta-Vista was better back in the day. The thing with Google, is it was working well before I ever heard of it. It spread via word-of-mouth, and it is synonymous with web search. Cuil would have been better off waiting until the search technology was well refined.
Have you tried Cuil.com? What do you think?
Inquiring mind(s) want to know : )
Patrick Wolf said,
July 28, 2008 @ 9:30 am
Had a similar experience. Eg. Searched for Oracle APEX, didn’t find anything. It only excepted the long form “Oracle Application Express”. And BTW I don’t like the ranking, because on Google I’m on the first page when searching for the above terms, but on Cuil I’m somewhere…
I’m also not sure if I like the image feature, because it looks like that it uses a image which is related to the topic and if you go to the second result page, sometimes the images do not change and it’s hard to notice if you have moved on to the second page.
For me it’s not really a Google killer.
Patrick
Daryl said,
July 28, 2008 @ 10:31 am
Try rman restore
Apparantly nobody uses rman restore
Thomas Roach said,
July 28, 2008 @ 10:41 am
I just did a previous post about RMAN restore : )
http://www.oraclerant.com/?p=29
Delfino Nunez said,
July 28, 2008 @ 11:08 am
Well I tried the page in the morning and it was like “cool”,
at 3pm ET I read this post and the main page never returned, I even had “http://www.cuil.com/info/unavailable.html” on the address bar and a page with errors.
Then five minutes later tried again and the main pages showed (very slow compared with google), I tried your string “Oracle 600 error” and it finished a few seconds later (not to fast) with a blank page.
http://www.cuil.com/search?q=Oracle+600+error
so, not a very good tool for the moment
Asif Momen said,
July 28, 2008 @ 2:09 pm
Hi,
I tried searching for my blog “momendba” by it says:
<>
Probably, my blog (http://momendba.blogspot.com) is not part of 120 Billion web pages.
Regards
Asif Momen said,
July 28, 2008 @ 2:10 pm
Well, the error message disappeared in my comment, so here it is:
“No results because of high load…
Due to excessive load, our servers didn’t return results. Please try your search again.”
Gary said,
July 28, 2008 @ 5:45 pm
Same as Asif.
“The thing with Google, is it was working well before I ever heard of it. It spread via word-of-mouth, and it is synonymous with web search”
But back then, there was only word-of-mouth (or word of email/usenet). Word-of-blog/rss means that if you are going to launch a ‘google-killer’, you better be sure your infrastructure can cope with at least a centi-google level of load for that week when it is first blogged about and people rush to try it.
PS. Altavista is still there, and has results for rman restore, cuil, and momendba
Arvind said,
July 29, 2008 @ 1:21 pm
probably Cuil folks read your blog.
I did get results for ‘Oracle Error 600′ but it did’nt find any results for ‘.Net’
it is going to take time for the challenger to pose a real threat to the megastar ‘google’.
Thomas Roach said,
July 29, 2008 @ 1:49 pm
Arvind,
I just did a search on Ora-600 and some things did some up this time, but not much of it is relevant. It definitely needs some more tweaks. The algorithm is off or it doesn’t have the information it needs to give a good answer.