Not 'Cuil' enough?
A leader in the search engine market, Google has been perpetually challenged by newer contenders that claim to be 'bigger, better and more efficient'. Last heard, another engine called Cuil, pronounced as 'cool', tried to be a Google killer
THE GOOGLE search engine is a simple, yet highly sophisticated tool that has revolutionized the way we retrieve information today. And of course, since it is the numero uno search engine, it has perhaps become a trend lately for newer search engines to be in the news by touting themselves as ’Google killers’. The latest in the bandwagon is Cuil, pronounced as ’cool’. Indeed it was different than Google and it did have some features that made one say ’wow!’
To start off, Cuil said it ranked pages based on content compared to Google which indexed pages on popularity. Secondly, it claimed to have indexed more pages than Google. Indeed, at time of writing this piece, the count of indexed pages on Cuil was 121,617,892,992 (that’s over 120 billion pages; about three times the count of pages indexed by any other engine). It also boasted of a sophisticated look with search results appearing something like a magazine pages. But unfortunately, none of this has quite helped Cuil, which reportedly raised over $30 million to start its venture, and had former-Googlers as its founders.
The engine fails heavily in its relevancy despite the huge number of pages. The results seem too random. Even the number of retrievals seems far less compared to what Google fetches. Features like image search are absent as of now. But maybe, the engine needs to be given its time to develop. As a start-up however, which went gaga around town calling itself the ’Google killer’ was a sure mistake.
This is an essential question that hounds most users who are introduced to users as alternatives to Google. Indeed, if relevancy results of Google are good, why should someone switch to another engine? Its results satisfy 90 percent of people’s search queries on the net. This very fact makes it tough to break the Google monopoly is and so just why would the user want to even think about another product even if, in the rarest of the cases, Google fails him/her?
Secondly, the distribution system of Google search engine is so powerful that many users might just not know how to adopt an alternative. As an example, with Google as an integral part of Mozilla Firefox, and even other browsers, it has become an indispensable box that most people get used to and they just wouldn’t want to get rid of it. The biggest advantage of Google currently, thus is that even if it has a competition which is really better than it, the pervasion of Google would be difficult to beat. Who Else Are In The War?
The big players in internet search are Google, Microsoft, Yahoo and others like AOL. Yet there are newer search engine companies that keep coming up to challenge them. Barring Cuil, others are Ask.com, AltSearchEngine.com, Dogpile.com, etc. But since Google remains as a formidable competitor to even heavyweights like Microsoft and Yahoo, these have a long way to go.
Some engines are specialized in nature and only search information in specific fields like Monster.com (jobs), Zillow.com (real estate) or Kayak.com (travel). Such sites claim to unaffected by Google as their target and revenue systems are different. The question though is, when Google satisfactorily provides answers to even queries on these sites, why should such specialized search engines appeal to people?
In reality, the challenge to even contemplate something comparable to Google is a mammoth task. Not only is it about the repute and marketing the new product against Google, it is also about loads of dollars.
Some new initiatives try to market themselves by strategically offering a distinguishing feature to Google. One example is changing the look and feel of new search engine – displaying of results in columns, like Cuil does or maybe, providing visual search as SearchMe.com does.
But there is a lot of money to be made that has investors pooling in. One lucrative motivation is the idea of promoting search engines as ’Google killers’ and getting acquired by big-shot rival companies of Google. The result could be profit of millions of dollars for the investor. Powerset was one such application that Microsoft acquired last month for a reported $100 million, and its funding was about a mere $13 million. Indian Scene
One may remember the humble Khoj.com as the earliest Indian venture in the search engine arena. Another venture is Guruji.com which has its own proprietary search algorithm and offers search in multi-Indian languages. Not much activity is seen yet in India in the search engine domain. Most sites offer search results powered by established player like AltaVista, Yahoo and of course, in most cases, Google. Google’s killer exists…
An article on the net suggests that Google’s biggest killer would be not Microsoft, not Yahoo nor any other third party. Rather astonishingly, Google’s killer would be Google itself. It sure seems true as of now. Considering that Google continues its efficient result delivery to search terms despite heavy traffic, spam, malware, information overload among others. Google will continue to survive. The moment Google loses grip on this, chances are that Google will flounder under its own massive weight. But as they say, time will only tell. Currently, chances are less that any startup will pose a big threat to Google anytime in the near future. As for Cuil, it probably needs to cool its heels for a while before it can actually take over Google.
Secondly, the distribution system of Google search engine is so powerful that many users might just not know how to adopt an alternative. As an example, with Google as an integral part of Mozilla Firefox, and even other browsers, it has become an indispensable box that most people get used to and they just wouldn’t want to get rid of it. The biggest advantage of Google currently, thus is that even if it has a competition which is really better than it, the pervasion of Google would be difficult to beat. Who Else Are In The War?
The big players in internet search are Google, Microsoft, Yahoo and others like AOL. Yet there are newer search engine companies that keep coming up to challenge them. Barring Cuil, others are Ask.com, AltSearchEngine.com, Dogpile.com, etc. But since Google remains as a formidable competitor to even heavyweights like Microsoft and Yahoo, these have a long way to go.
Some engines are specialized in nature and only search information in specific fields like Monster.com (jobs), Zillow.com (real estate) or Kayak.com (travel). Such sites claim to unaffected by Google as their target and revenue systems are different. The question though is, when Google satisfactorily provides answers to even queries on these sites, why should such specialized search engines appeal to people?
In reality, the challenge to even contemplate something comparable to Google is a mammoth task. Not only is it about the repute and marketing the new product against Google, it is also about loads of dollars.
Some new initiatives try to market themselves by strategically offering a distinguishing feature to Google. One example is changing the look and feel of new search engine – displaying of results in columns, like Cuil does or maybe, providing visual search as SearchMe.com does.
But there is a lot of money to be made that has investors pooling in. One lucrative motivation is the idea of promoting search engines as ’Google killers’ and getting acquired by big-shot rival companies of Google. The result could be profit of millions of dollars for the investor. Powerset was one such application that Microsoft acquired last month for a reported $100 million, and its funding was about a mere $13 million. Indian Scene
One may remember the humble Khoj.com as the earliest Indian venture in the search engine arena. Another venture is Guruji.com which has its own proprietary search algorithm and offers search in multi-Indian languages. Not much activity is seen yet in India in the search engine domain. Most sites offer search results powered by established player like AltaVista, Yahoo and of course, in most cases, Google. Google’s killer exists…
An article on the net suggests that Google’s biggest killer would be not Microsoft, not Yahoo nor any other third party. Rather astonishingly, Google’s killer would be Google itself. It sure seems true as of now. Considering that Google continues its efficient result delivery to search terms despite heavy traffic, spam, malware, information overload among others. Google will continue to survive. The moment Google loses grip on this, chances are that Google will flounder under its own massive weight. But as they say, time will only tell. Currently, chances are less that any startup will pose a big threat to Google anytime in the near future. As for Cuil, it probably needs to cool its heels for a while before it can actually take over Google.
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