The big questions now are how does the relevancy hold up and can word-of-mouth really still build si

Follow
Can any start-up search engine “be the next Google?” Many have wondered this, and today’s launch of Cuil (pronounced e filing “cool”) may provide the best test case since Google itself overtook e filing more established search engines. Cuil provides what appears to be a comprehensive index of the web, offers a unique display presentation, and emerges at a time when people might be ready to embrace a quality “underdog” service.
The big questions now are how does the relevancy hold up and can word-of-mouth really still build significant share? [ Note : The Cuil site was supposed to be live for searches at of 9:01pm Pacific time on July 27, but so far I’m still seeing only a holding page. I’d expect this to change fairly soon].
There’s no end of companies e filing that have been trying to take on Google as a search destination. Earlier this year, my Google Challengers:2008 Edition article covered some of these, like Hakia , Mahalo , and Search Wikia . You can add to that list other companies like Gigaweb and Exalead . None of them have made a dent in Google’s share.
Indeed, the established players of Yahoo, Microsoft, e filing and Ask.com — all of whom have established quality search products — haven’t dented Google either. e filing So what makes Cuil worthy of special attention?
For e filing one, Cuil has an impressive pedigree with its three founders: Tom Costello of IBM’s WebFountain project, plus Anna Patterson and Russell Power of Google’s TeraGoogle project, Google’s massive search index. Cuil also counts former AltaVista founder Louis Monier — who later went to eBay and then Google — as part of the team.
These people know search. In particular, they know on-the-firing line, heavy duty, industrial strength search. Not only that, they’re e filing unleashing what appears to be a comprehensive service that anyone can use. Indeed, Google e filing already did a blog post in reaction to Cuil and its size claims on Friday, before Cuil even launched or those claims became public. If Google’s paying that much attention, then anyone should.
Cuil is claiming to have the largest index of the web: 120 billion pages indexed (with a total of 186 billion seen by its crawler; spam and duplicate content are among things excluded from what gets indexed). In talking with them, Cuil estimated they were three times the size of Google. Sounds pretty awesome, right?
Sigh. Yes, size matters. You want to have a comprehensive collection of documents from across the web. But having a lot of documents e filing doesn’t mean you are most relevant. e filing As I wrote back in September 2005, when Google famously dropped the number of documents it had indexed: e filing
Last century, in December 1995 to be exact, AltaVista burst upon the search engine scene with what was at that time a giant index of 21 million pages, well above rivals that were in the 1 million to 2 million range. e filing The web was growing fast, and the more pages you had, the greater the odds you really were going to find that needle in a haystack. Bigger did to some degree mean better.
That fact wasn’t wasted on the PR folks. Games to seem bigger began in earnest. Lycos would talk about the number e filing of pages it “knew” about, even if these weren’t actually indexed e filing or in any way accessible to searchers through its search engine. That irritated search engine Excite so much that it even posted a page on how to count URLs, as you can see archived here .
While size initially DID mean bigger was better, that soon disappeared when the scale of indexes e filing grew from counting millions of pages to tens of millions. Bigger no longer meant better because for many queries, you could get overwhelmed with matches.
I’ve long played with the needle-in-the-haystack metaphor to explain this. You want to find the needle? You need to have the whole haystack, size proponents will say. But if I dump the entire haystack on your head, can you find the needle then? Just being biggest isn’t good enough.
That’s why I and others have been saying don’t fixate on size for as long as 1997 and 1998 . Bigger no longer meant better, regardless of the many size wars that continued to erupt. Remember, Google — when it came to popular attention in 1998 and 1999 — was one of the tiniest search engines e filing at around 20 to 85 million pages. Despite that supposed lack of comprehensiveness, it grew and grew because of the quality of its results. e filing
Why have the size wars persisted? Search engines have seen an index size announcement as a quick, e filing effective way to give the impression they were more relevant. In lieu of a relevancy figure, size figures could be trotted out and the search engine with the biggest bar on the chart wins!
Given this history, seeing Cuil trot out size figures is incredibly disheartening and a step backwards, not forwards. Time b