Cuil Doesn’t Measure Up

Well, it’s pretty obvious that they hype over the new search engine, Cuil, was far greater than what the site could actually deliver.

I won’t repeat all of the reasons they won’t be the next Google killer. If you’re reading this, you’ve surely read about them all several times already. Instead, I did a semi-scientific test of their search results. Since they claim to be the largest search engine in existence, they should have the highest number of results for any given search term. Right???

I chose several words at random as they popped into my head. I searched for these terms on Google.com, Yahoo.com, MSN.com, and Cuil.com and recorded the number of search results. For Cuil, the findings are probably not what they were hoping for. Without any more chit chat, let’s get to the charts and graphs!

Search Test Report

From the chart above, you can clearly see that Yahoo! dominates as far as search results go. We’re not talking about relevancy, we’re only interested in number of search results returned. Google could be considered second, beating MSN and Cuil most of the time. Surprisingly, MSN had the lowest number of total results throughout the entire test. (Even lower than Cuil) Something odd were the search terms where Cuil beat out all other search engines, even Yahoo!.

• “asp.net books” – Cuil: 602,186,415 / Yahoo!: 26,200,000
• “google knol” – Cuil: 38,607,628 / Yahoo!: 15,400,000
• “make liquid soap” – Cuil: 127,604,750 / Yahoo!: 12,500,000

This may not be the most scientific test, or be the definitive demise of Cuil, but if they’re the largest search engine in the universe, why don’t they give me the most search results??? Please let me know what you think in the comments.

Raw Search Data