Making A Difference

Cuil launched Monday with muted fanfare.  I visited, searched for myself, and laughed when the picture of Emily Baker appeared next to my LinkedIn profile - which was number 1 on the list.  So in terms of finding some reasonable facsimile of me to stroke my ego-test, it did in text terms.  In graphical terms, well, not so much.

Nothing else on the first results page was actually me.  Just a bunch of other people that have my name.  But the layout kept me interested and intrigued for a few minutes.  I read on.  I clicked through a few pages of search results.  The newness held my interest, but I’m sure this would get old soon.  So what will Cuil bring to the table?

“They” say that competition is good.  Brings more benefit to the consumer.  Mandates innovation.  Google, itself, believes they’ve only cataloged some small percentage of the worlds’ information, so plenty of room remains to capture market-share.  That’s where Cuil’s story comes in.  Somebody needs to take on Google, and they need to do this in an unexpected fashion in order to make any progress.

So what’s the story?  Rather than page and link popularity, Cuil presents a value proposition based on contextual relationships:

Rather than rely on superficial popularity metrics, Cuil searches for and ranks pages based on their content and relevance. When we find a page with your keywords, we stay on that page and analyze the rest of its content, its concepts, their inter-relationships and the page’s coherency.

So it’s not all about links.  Cuil goes beyond links.  Is this a compelling story?  Maybe.  If they can survive the short-term.  How many long-term stories make it.  Really.  Sure, we pay lip service to taking the long-view of value.  But how many football coaches will we put up with after two losing…er…rebuilding years?  When do we give a company more than 3 months to turn their stock price around?  Compelling?  Maybe.  The question is, do the rest of us have the patience when we can get what we need from Google right now.  And if the long-term results are different, how much more valuable will Cuil’s search results be than Googles?  Will it be worth the difference and worth the wait.

More compelling, perhaps, is their perspective on ethics.  Where Google says, “don’t be evil,” which implies the opportunity could arise, Cuil says, “don’t be tempted”:

We believe that analyzing the Web rather than our users is a more useful approach, so we don’t collect data about you and your habits, lest we are tempted to peek.

Will it fly?  I dunno.  I hope so.  I enjoy seeing the David and Goliath fight.  Still, I used to be paranoid about releasing my personal information to anyone, and now I’m looking for ways to let the world know about who I am.  With the next generation comfortably growing up without expectations of privacy, perhaps Cuil becomes the search engine of the AARP.

Google’s value is that it knows everything about me.  Cuil’s, that it remembers nothing about me. Let’s sit back for Round 2.

- Andy