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I’m trying to force myself to use the new search engine Cuil more and more, but at the end of the day the story is always the same: NO RELEVANCE.

Let’s try this: what is the most relevant link if I search for my name on a search engine? I don’t have any doubt, MY BLOG.

Ok, let’s see what happens.

Google

The results provide by Google make a lot of sense. My blog is the result #1 with the About page shown just below so that if someone wants to get information about myself can easily find what he is looking for. Very good.

Live Search

Live Search’s results are not bad, with my about page above my blog. The strange thing is that the eComm page when there is my bio as one of the speakers of the conference is the #1 result. I would say that I prefer Google, but the relevance of these results is still very high.

Yahoo

The result #1 with Yahoo is my about page, above the blog home page. It’s fine, it works very well, definitely as good as the Google one.

Altavista

I don’t know if there are people still using Altavista, anyway the results provided by this search engine are exactly like those by Yahoo. Very good.

Cuil

Last but not least, here is Cuil. Ok, where is my blog? Where is my about page? The first results are two posts by Jeff Pulver then a news by Jajah, then all the posts written by Alec Saunders with the tag “luca filigheddu” and so on. Relevance equals to ZERO. The worst one.

All that said, where do they want to go? Who can ever think to switch from any of the search engines above to Cuil?

Ok, maybe it’s me, trying with other names I saw that sometimes (I mean, sometimes..) it works better, but it’s still much far from Google and the others.

Do you want a very bad result? Try to search for Tom Keating… You get the football player link to Wikipedia… with the photo of Tom Keating from TMCNet!!!

Please…

Technorati Tags: altavista, cuil, Google, live search, luca filigheddu, search engine, yahoo

I do believe that becoming a Google competitor is definitely one of the most difficult challenges for new startups these days. The story could be different if the potential competitor has been developed and founded by former Google employees.

Mr. Costello, a former researcher at Stanford, said that with 120 billion Web pages, Cuil’s search index is larger than any other. The company uses a form of data mining to group Web pages by content, which makes the search engine more efficient, he said. Instead of showing results as short snippets of text and images with links, it displays longer entries and uses more pictures. It also provides tools to help users further refine their queries.

Cuil , pronounced “Cool”, unveiled today, seems to be promising, even if you need to get accostumed with an interface which is much different from Google or Yahoo.

Searches lead to a table of results where you can find a summary about the results itself. The following is the results table for “voip“

Unfortunately I found out that there is still much work to be done. For example, If I search for my name “luca filigheddu”, that leads to 20.500 results on Google, with my blog on top, this page comes out:

I made other tries and I have to say I’m not impressed at this time. Ok, it’s just the first day, so I’ll give it more time. By the way, the service is down right now:

Do you think there could be a service that can compete with Google, while other more consolidated and historical services like Yahoo, Altavista or Microsoft Live Search are still struggling to keep a decent market share ?

UPDATE: I noticed Duncan Riley pointed out the same issues

Technorati Tags: cuil, Google, luca filigheddu, search engine

The pitch I received about Twing.com immediately caught my attention. Why? I always get frustrated by search engines which come with standard open source online forums. They never work.

Hopefully Twing will finally solve this issue. Check it out.

Technorati Tags: forums, luca filigheddu, search engine, twing