Google vs Cuil - Not exactly David vs Goliath

We live in the 21 st century- an era claimed to be one for free Information.Want some Information?Just Google the keywords! Did India beat Pakistan?Just search for News updates in Google!Bored?Read movie reviews from Google! Want to study for a change, but suddenly you find that you don't have the material?No probs,just search Google books! Wanna search for some images?Yup,you know exactly what to do.

And so when I first came to know of Cuil during a casual chat with my friend,my initial reaction was dismissive and I thought it was just another search engine jumping into the ever widening bandwagon.I conveyed this to my friend and I further believed that Cuil would soon fizz out from the Search arena as quickly as it came and its only claim to 15 minutes of fame would be that it was the "latest".But my friend was persuasive and insisted that I ought to try Cuil (which,by the way is pronounced "Cool").I was intrigued but my curiosity was aroused even more when I came to know of two facts which I found by...errr....Googling the keyword Cuil ;).

The first was that Cuil was started by two former Google employees who apparently left the company in protest of some of its policies.( Man!To join Google was the dream of a lifetime! But to leave it in protest!!?!! ).The second fact that turned me towards Cuil was that it claimed to search the largest database of webpages in the world -- larger than Google,Yahoo! or Ask.

And so with nothing better to do on that so-called "study holiday",I decided to burn some time by evaluating the results of Cuil against Google.When I first typed cuil.com in the browser's location bar , I pressed the Enter key with a sense of anticipation half expecting some irritating design with flashy ads sputtered all over the page that distracted your attention and loaded for an eternity in your 256 kpbs connection.But a pleasant surprise awaited me.

Cuil inherited Google's simple ,easy-to-load and fast interface although the CSS was a bit different and the entire background was black in place of Google's familiar likable white.Now when u are searching for some info you expect good,fast design and thankfully both Google and Cuil seemed to accept this policy.(Google CEO Eric Schmidt once remarked "Google is the only website with the stated objective of having the user leave its site as soon as possible")
Now you judge a merchant by his wares.So I decided that Cuil would face its actual test only when I started searching.Initially the results seemed to be equally good and Cuil lead me to relavant sites when I typed simple keywords like "Computer","Network Security" or "Ubuntu".But the ruthless tester that I am, I typed something really long like "applications of information security +network +authentication +elearning".Google returned about 10 pages of results,some of it very relevant indeed.And our eager competitor?Well,Cuil says No Luck,Buddy;Try lesser keywords or something like that.
Oh come on!The world's largest database of search queries and no result for that?Well sadly,it shows us that Cuil still has a long way to beat Big Bro Google ;).
That was not all.I tried searching "Cuil" on Google and Cuil.Predictably Google's first result was the Cuil website itself followed by some articles on Cuil.But Cuil when searching itself,returned some rather bizarre results.The third result in the first page for instance,assumed I had misspelt the french word 'ciel'! Another webpage turned out to be an Irish dictionary that said Cuil meant Knowledge (and anyway that's where Cuil's name is derived from).2 pages of results and none that lead me to cuil.com itself!
I was exasperated!What kind of a search engine can't search itself?!Fortunately,this problem was solved by Cuil more recently.But other problems continue to remain.Search engines mostly returns results based on a number of criteria and the number of people who visited the site is a key criterion.So if you are searching for the winner of yesterday's match between,say,Manchester Utd and Liverpool,you can't expect Cuil to return a good result.This is because you are searching for recent news and so not many people would have visited that site which updated the event only recently meaning you are more likely to end up with the result for last year's match between Manu and Liverpool!The guys at Google of course solved this problem ingeniously by offering a separate Search for News Updates.Similarly there is no Image,book or blog search either.

Of course Google has its own share of problems.But for more compelling reasons mentioned above I guess Cuil might have displaced Y! search and Ask Search engine.But I guess it will remain my second favourite for causes highlighted above and Google will remain the solution for my Search requirements for a long time to come.Not to end this blog on a depressing note for Cuil supporters,I guess Cuil will come in handy in case of a contingency like when Google fails to load or --horror of horrors-- Google gets into the list of banned sites in my College ;) !