KEY POINTS:
Much of the buzz around the online space in the last 24 hours has been around the launch of what has been touted as the Google Killer, new search engine Cuil, (pronounced cool).
Cuil was founded by highly respected search experts, husband and wife team Tom Costello and Anna Patterson who were then joined by Russell Power. Patterson and Power are ex-Google search experts, and Google must be fuming that their inventions were not added to Google's intellectual property library and may now be used against them.
Cuil's main claim to fame is that it will launch with an index of 120 billion web pages, making them arguably the most comprehensive search engine on the web (Google doesn't disclose the size of their index, although they claim to know about a trillion unique web pages).
Cuil also claims to have better search results than Google and utilize the semantic approach to search that works to understand how words are related (New Zealand - Lamb - Wine, for example), to return more relevant results to users.
We decided to give it a whirl last night shortly after launch and while I can see it's relevance to the US market it really failed to deliver on relevant local search. This of course was always going to be the case for a little back water country like NZ.
There are probably more pages to index in a city the size of Seattle than there are in all of NZ, nevertheless I would expect the service to get better over time.
Cuil went live last night and then went down after only a couple of hours of operation due to an apparently overwhelming response which lead to a server melt down. At the time of writing this article they were back up again, but you'd have thought that with all the hype around their launch they would have been better prepared?
Highlights of the service include a new user interface that is very different from the traditional two column approach adopted by most popular search engines like Yahoo or Google, with results on the left and paid advertisements on the right hand side.
In Cuil results are shown in three columns and contain an image and more summary text than existing search engines. It also recommends other categories (with varying levels of relevance) that may be of interest to the searcher e.g. my search for New Zealand Lamb recommended categories for NZ wine, territorial authorities and former British colonies. In addition to refinement by category, Cuil will recommend related searches via tabs across the top of search results.
The Cuil search experience was refreshing for a short period of time but I can't see Kiwis switching from Google just yet. It does, however, have a huge amount of potential, especially if they are able to continue developing their index and provide more refined search results.
How they build the advertising model will be the next big question. Obviously some form of paid search result is on the cards and it will be interesting to see their take on paid advertising, taking into account that they are essentially a semantic search engine that from a user interface perspective looks intent on turning the search game upside down.
