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One of the first things you think of when taking a new web concept to market has to be the name. You need something catchy, memorable – and, you’d think, pronounceable. So what was going through the minds of the founders of Cuil (pronounced “cool”, apparently), we can only guess. Worse still, it turns out that the site’s domain name is just one letter-swap from an Italian hard-core porn site located at culi.com. But whilst the founders’ etymological credentials might be in doubt, their experience in the field of search engine technology can’t be faulted. CEO Tom Costello has a PhD from Stanford and worked for IBM on storage technology, and company president Anna Patterson worked as a search architect at Google. Sadly, a difficult name hasn’t been the only issue to plague the site. The publicity puff claimed it “provides organized and relevant results based on Web page content analysis”, and its unique selling point appears to be the “magazine-format” layout of results pages, which include suitable photos to illustrate results "that will help people visually check whether the result is something they want to click on.". But Computer Science researcher Jonathan Grattage found something he certainly didn’t want to click on: one link to his professional homepage was illustrated with graphic gay pornography, and another with a mugshot of an American soldier. Needless to say, neither has anything to do with Dr Grattage’s research into functional quantum programming, and neither features on his website. Meanwhile, in a note posted on the site shortly after launch, the founders apologised for the site’s first day performance, calling the demand “overwhelming – literally”. Not to worry, though – every application has post-rollout bugs, so perhaps Cuil can be forgiven a few minor problems. Unfortunately, but perhaps unsurprisingly, its results seem to fall some way short of its more established predecessor. The site claims to index 120 billion web pages – a number it says is three times as many as Google and ten times as many as Microsoft’s Live Search – although Google disputes this, insisting it has the largest page index in the world. So we decided to run a few tests. A search for “contractor uk” is fruitful, with your favourite contractor portal coming up number one. Strangely, other pages on the site come up at number two, three, four... in fact, every link on the first page of results is a page on this site. Nothing wrong with that, but Google will clump results from one page into sub-links from the first result, with results from other sites occupying the rest of the results pages. Strangely, while Cuil claims to have found over 50,000 matches for our search, it only displays two pages of results. Meanwhile, a search for yours-truly results in a large number of matches for my football manager namesake, thankfully not illustrated with picture s of turnips or Sun front pages. The search also illustrates one of Cuil’s genuinely innovative features. Apparently twigging on to the fact that Graham Taylor is a football manager, it offers me a variety of related searches, such as searches for other England football team managers, Watford managers and failed footballers – all of whom it helpfully lists, in tidy expandable panels. Sadly, its innovations are likely to be masked by its problematic start and difficult name. The world really needs a competitor for Google, but Cuil it ain’t. Graham Taylor Aug 4, 2008 Email this article Printer friendly page Previous Page
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