Many have tried before, and no doubt that many will try in the future. Recently there are two new players in the search engine market, Cuil, created by former employees of the world most famous website, and Bing, by Microsoft. Cuil is the main subject for this article.
The Cuil team claims that their website is the world's biggest search engine, as we can see on their about us section. There we can read that their index is three and ten times bigger than Google and Microsoft indexes respectively. Besides that fact, we can easily see that their concept on web search is a bit distinct of the one of their major adversary, and a new philosophy was precisely what made Google big against their opponents at the time of their appearance. But Cuil's new concept goes beyond the way web pages are indexed, and they also introduce a new way of presenting the results, which focus on search refinement, offering the user a myriad of ways to narrow the search. Some of them look very promising to me.
Having that in mind, I made a few searches myself, and compared the results with Google, and I must admit that in many cases Cuil presented me with more satisfactory results. Being founded by former employees of Google, Cuil has on their side of the fight, a team of people that knows the opponent from the inside, and is capable to identify where the faults are better than anyone, and contour the ever increasing strategies of the SEO (Search Engine Optimization) experts to manipulate the search results. Let's analyze one hypothetical example:
I want to make some online betting. Being new to the world of web gambling I went to Google and typed online betting on the search box. Not surprisingly, all the top ten results were related to the subject, but the first bookmaker link was on the fourth result. Cuil presented me a cyber sport betting website right in the first result what is exactly what I was looking for. Because I don't know any of the options presented to me by both search engines, I decided to look for some reviews, in order to make a safe choice, so I searched for top online betting companies. Google did not provide me the list I was expecting, in fact, the results were quite unsatisfactory, being the first an online casino Cuil gave me some good info right from the start but not really what I was looking for, but at least the links were all related to my search. I then replaced the word top by best on my search term. I got some satisfactory results for both search engines, but while Cuil presented me my list right on the first result, I had to scroll a bit further on Google to get what I wanted. Finally one thing caught my attention, all the websites on Cuil results on online betting, rank really well in bookmakers reviews, unlike Google picks, which mix good bookmakers with others not so good.
Although this was a very simple experimentation, it was enough to conclude that Google is actually having a problem with manipulated results, while Cuil still is not important enough for the SEO experts.
But even if I conclude that Cuil is performing surprisingly well, I still don't believe that it poses a real threat to Google's search engine. There are a couple of facts that we all know, and we must not forget when analyzing something like this; Google position in the market currently surpasses way over 90% of web searches; Google is the built in search engines for most browsers and websites; Google is the first index on which every webmasters submit their new website; Google is the most famous website in the world
Google search results are decreasing in quality mainly because of SEO strategies, but that happened before, and they had the power and the ability to adapt and fight those strategies. Surely they will have it again. What if SEO experts start to dedicate some time and effort to Cuil? Will they be able to contour that as Google does? Will they maintain their quality standards?
To beat Google certainly is an ambitious objective but the prize could not be as high as people think. Let's consider a hypothetical situation where Cuil becomes a real opponent to Google. What will they do with all that traffic? They have to monetize it; their investors will want to see some ROI (Return on Investment). And how will they do that? Usually, most of the income of a webmaster is through advertising, and Google Adsense is still the best advertising platform for websites in the market. Will Cuil.com advertise through Google Adsense, or will they use another not so well paid system? Will they create their own Adsense program? And if yes, will they have the power to attract enough advertisers?
One final thought. As we've seen, Cuil has a new concept on web search. Google is well known for acquiring the new next big thing on the internet, like they did with YouTube or FeedBurner. If Cuil becomes a trend, chances are that Google will make an offer for it, and the Cuil founders will have to accept it, knowing the difficulties we've seen on the above paragraph. Cuil would then become a Google alternative search, easily switchable through a link in the search engine front end, or it will simply disappear