Well there is a new search engine on the block. It’s name is Cuil and its built by ex-Google engineers. Similar to Google the initial search page is simplistic and very reminiscent of early Google. I wanted to compare the two though to see what kind of results they return, and that is when the most obvious differences come to light.
I searched the terms “web hosting” in both engines and immediately I noticed that Cuil has a very different way of displaying those results from the standard list of websites returned from many other engines. Cuil displays search results in paragraph form, as if you were browsing a news site hunting for an interesting article to read. Its related searches have been placed in a tabbed bar above the main display window, and offers more pages of results along the bottom. Despite being in paragraph form both Google and Cuil returned 11 results for the first page, with other pages available. The results are also similar. Cuil seems to target more web hosting companies, while Google has more of a mix between information on web hosting and web hosting companies themselves. Googles information also appears to be a tad more up to date then Cuil. Overall I think Google is still probably the better search engine, but of course they have significantly more familiarity and a larger index to pull from. I wouldn’t count Cuil out though, after all this is their first week live on the web. If you would like to look at the searches I used in writing this article, please follow the links below.
Cuil – http://www.cuil.com/search?q=web%20hosting&sl=long&m=
Google – http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=web+hosting&btnG=Google+Search
Yes I’ve tried Cuil too and liked how they have images next to the searches BUT when I searched for a keyword (a name of an jewelry artist) there was one search that directed me elsewhere.
Am looking forward to seeing it develop into an alternative for Google and not a clone of it.