You may have heard of Cuil, the latest website to be granted the title Google-Killer. With all the attention given to the search engine giant Google over the last couple years, it is often wondered aloud, who will be the next Google? While its impossible to say whether another company can catch lightening in a bottle in the unique (and profitable) way Google did, every year there are scores of competitors that are suggested as the next Google-Killer, unsurprisingly, you likely haven’t heard of many of these because they didn’t last. So what makes the latest competitor to get media attention a contender? Cuil seeks to build on some of Google’s most successful features, of course without infringing on Google’s trademarks, but is laying claim to indexing a far larger number of sites in its search, roughly 120 Billion websites.

The company has developed the software to use fewer computers to index more content, and this alone may give them an advantage against their larger competitor. As well, the site was founded by an alumnus of Google itself. Backed with enough capital to try to take Google down, the site has officially launched.

As a first impression, I have to say I immediately disliked Cuil. Clearly the site is Google inspired, and to that degree it may be similarity that bothers me. The designers learned from the failure of Yahoo! and others to take down Google, clearly when it comes to search people prefer minimalist design. The site is a stark black, sporting only a logo and a search box, along with a few token links and the text “Search 121,617,892,992 web pages.” Unfortunately the design is off center, the text box seems small for the screen, and the site itself doesn’t evoke the same familiar feeling as Google. This is, of course, just my opinion of the site layout, which could easily be changed substantially over the next couple months. On to searches!

Unfortunately my dislike of the search engine only grew when I entered my first search. I started with an easy one, searching for the musicians Belle & Sebastian. Whereas Google returns, in this order, their official site, their Wikipedia article, their Myspace page, and their Last.fm page, Cuil’s first two entries are the same, the American and British versions of the artists’ home page. A significant number of the first page results were subpages from their site, subpages from wikipedia, and sites not in English. Even worse, rather than displaying a list of results, the search engine displays results laid out across the screen, without actually ranking them.

The site introduces an interesting feature, allowing you to try your search within specific categories, but really I was so frustrated with the layout by this time that I had completely lost interest in the search engine. Obviously, this is just my opinion, but the site designers need to rethink their method for displaying results. There is a reason Google, Yahoo!, MSN, and others all display an ordered list, its easier for our brains to process information that is grouped and ordered. By displaying the equivalent of a desk strewn with results, Cuil creates major visual whiplash for this reviewer. Conceptually, their goal seems admirable, expand the search base, and provide a more informative look at the site before navigating to it. Unfortunately, the problem with Google isn’t really that search results don’t give you enough information.

In the end, Cuil represents an interesting concept wrapped in an unfortunate implementation. While the idea of adding more pages to a search engine seems admirable, I worry that they focused too much on this aspect of their engine. They seem to have made some major assumptions about how people process information that are flat out wrong, and frankly that worries me. The site may meet the needs of others, but I didn’t see anything worth switching for in my brief encounter.

Posted by Ian Logsdon.
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