CuiLater

cuil is yet another search engine from a group of people with plenty of experience in the area. Ex google staff have gotten together and improved upon the google model to create something better organized, with greater coverage and top notch efficiency.

Kudos to the effort, it's a fine model. It looks sharp, is easy to use, has effective results and is well arranged. cuil is young of course, so you can expect minor imperfections to be refined as time goes on. The question is, is there valid motivation for cuil's time to continue?

There are a few things very obviously missing which get an awful lot of attention in google. Firstly, the image search. It's not something everyone uses but it's users tend to use it an awful lot. Secondly, and more importantly, is the local search facility. The local search started out small, but has expanded with google maps and the integration of business information. Local search has been copied by numerous companies (at least in Australia) but nothing is as popular as google's local search. The local search is rapidly replacing the local phone book, which is a great thing! One place to visit for all your information requirements.

Is this a digression? Probably ... but only a little.

The point is that because people are comfortable with google (or yahoo, msn ... whatever your engine) they'll be happy to keep coming back ... even for other facilities. Search is an abstract concept that people needed to get used to. Google made searching simple, efficient and quick. Despite a barrier to adoption, people are happy and confident with their search engines. It's going to take something compelling to make people switch.

So lets review cuil. It's a keyword search, with text based results, wider search than google and very few additional facilities. So the most compelling change here is the scope of the search.

If most search engine users don't move past the third page of results, is there a lot of value having 200 results pages instead of 50 results pages? And if the new engine has less additional facilities, it's really only going to be an adjunctive stop (at best) for a limited number of users.

However unfortunate this may seem, it's a lesson that has to be learned by so many people and companies. There's a pretty darn good search engine out there that has basically wrapped up the search market and just seems to keep getting incrementally better. Okay, so it's not perfect but 99.9% of the world's internet users don't need perfect, they need simple and there's nothing simpler than a complete lack of options.

In modern society, people are far more specialized than ever before in history. When you spend all of your time looking at widgets, all you'll be able to think about will be how to improve widgets. It's quite possible (and from my experience, common) for widget makers to never stop and ask if the widget is already good enough.

It's a myopic view of the world. Spend 10 years improving a search engine and you'll come up with some ideas that will be viewed by your employer as extraneous. If you're really unlucky, you'll find somebody who'll fund the development of your marginal improvement to the most successful user service ever. Call me a big fat old cynic, but if Microsoft is losing 1.2 billion per year with it's internet services, is it possible that existing markets might already be sown up?