A Cuil Search Engine is Born - Debunking and Exploring
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Danny Sullivan does a good job of debunking each of these points in his Cuil review. I'll give you the quick version. First, size isn't as important as relevance; you can index billions of pages (Cuil claims 120 billion) and still deliver crappy results. Unfortunately, there is no good metric for relevance, but size doesn't work as a stand-in.
Second, Sullivan ran some tests that seemed to indicate that Cuil does depend on links to some extent when figuring out its results. He also found that Google does some link analysis, so Cuil and Google might not be as far apart here as Cuil would like you to believe.
Third, while Cuil does use its layout and certain features to improve organization of its results (as I'll show you in a minute), Google results are also diverse. And fourth, while privacy is good, it doesn't seem to have won any battles for other search engines – and lack of privacy hasn't exactly hindered Google's growth.
All of that said, let's take a look at what Cuil actually offers. I did an idle search or two on the search engine on Monday night, partly out of curiosity and partly because I knew I'd be writing this review. I read a lot of bad comments from other sites about the results. But the interface itself earned a lot of praise, and the screen shot below shows why.
What you see here is a three-column format, very similar to a magazine-style layout. You can also change it to a two-column layout if you wish, simply by clicking a link in the lower right corner. For each result, you get a much longer blurb than Google delivers with its snippets. You also get an image from the page (at least in theory; more on that in a bit) to help you decide whether to click through to the actual web site.
Do you remember that Cuil said one of its guiding principles is organizing your information? That gray box in the upper right hand corner of the results helps with that. Let me give you a closer look. For reference, I searched for “washington dc tourism” (without quotes).
Those are all logical categories. Now watch what happens when I hover over a category:
I can click on those links in turn, to do another search. But before I even do that search, I can just hover over a link if I want more information, and Cuil gives it to me. Take a look at what happens when I hover over the Washington Monument (virtually of course, not literally):
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