Cuil (pronounced “cool”) has just launched today, and looks like it might be the first search engine in a while to give Google some competition. The main thing Cuil promotes is the size of it’s index — 120 billion pages, compared to the estimated 40 billion pages in Google’s index.
However, we’re not sure what to make of the “larger” index. For almost any search query, Google returns more results. If Cuil had a bigger index, wouldn’t it have more results for common words? For example, a search for “horse” on Cuil produces 128,400,000 results, while the same query on Google produces 322,000,000 results.
Cuil also seems to be having some issues with multi-word queries, but I’m sure those bugs will work themselves out. As TechCrunch said, “Cuil is only an hour old at this point, Google has had a decade to perfect their search engine.”
I got some multi-word searches to work but also got a lot of “not found”. I like that there seem to be less false positive results. Google has been giving me a problem with that more lately, even with some straightforward searches.
It seems to be dying under the weight of a lot of press. It’ll be interesting to see if they can scale up quickly, or if they struggle with it like Twitter has.
Given their staff and their goals, I’m guessing it’s designed to scale nicely.