Cuil.com

By now most of you have probably heard of cuil.com from all the mainstream press it has been receiving since it's launch on Monday.

If you haven't heard of it...it's being heralded as the "Google Killer" because of it's stance on privacy issues and it's team being made up of ex-googlers.

As a Google enthusiast and loyalist, I was very weary about this site from the start. But I promised myself that I would give it a unbiased review after using it for a couple days. So here it is...Cuil.com is a 33 million dollar flop or better yet...the "Waterworld" of online ventures.

I wouldn't just say that about a new venture. But, this company is built on FALSE marketing and inferior results (as compared to the big 4 search engines).

First off, the company boosts that it searches close to three times the amount of web pages as Google (about 121 billion). This is greatly exaggerated. Doing some quick number crunching, I found that the site searches somewhere between 750 million to 1.3 billion less web pages then Google. I'll explain how I got these figures a little later.

You might be asking yourself, "But, they said that they're bigger". I know, I believed them too. But after about my 10th search, I found something very interesting. THEY DON'T INDEX SITES CREATED AFTER MAY/JUNE 2007!!! Websites created in June 2007 are not listed, while half of the web pages created in May of 2007 are included.

Try it yourself. Search for your new blog or website, or any site that was launched in the later part of 2007. Those sites are nowhere to be found. This by itself is a huge letdown. How can they compete with Google when it takes a full year until new search results start to appear? The answer is they can't...and they won't.

The funniest part of all of this is that you can't find cuil.com through cuil.com's search results. Ironic? That's the understatement of the year. I thought I would never say this, but I'd rather use MSN's Live than this supposed "Google Killer".

It's only fair that I explain how I figured out cuil.com's index is not as large as advertised. Well, since around 1.5 blogs (not web pages) get created every second, I extrapolated this figure until July of 2007. Using different values of "average pages per website" (anywhere from 5 to 233), my calculations show that they are missing at least 750 million web pages, but probably a lot more since not all websites are blogs and all of my variables were conservative.

In fact, after searching around 1,000 different web pages and sites on cuil, I wasn't able to find ONE page that wasn't listed in Google.

Where are these 80 billion extra web pages Cuil is supposed to find for us? I don't know. But one thing is for certain, the people behind this new venture shouldn't quit their day jobs.