The reason ReadWriteWeb has made this decision is to focus on building and extending our core ReadWriteWeb brand. The first fruits of this strategy were the Enterprise Channel (launched in August) and our new Jobwire product (launched last week). We have more channels and products in the pipeline.

A note about ReadWriteTalk, our podcast show. As it was not a network blog, but an extension of ReadWriteWeb, it will continue to be part of our business. Sean Ammirati will continue to host the show.

Stay tuned for more channels and products under the ReadWriteWeb brand.

Hat-tip to Quintura Blog, Center Networks and The Inquisitr for their posts today. Also see Charles' post at AltSearchEngines.

Another reason is that the founders made some big claims about challenging Google. The New York Times article states that Cuil promises to be "more comprehensive" than Google and give users "more relevant results".

Having ex-Googlers at the helm and making big claims is nothing new. They were also coming out of stealth mode, which helped the PR. But perhaps what made the difference this time was that some key industry pundits made some big claims themselves about Cuil.

Danny Sullivan, who runs SearchEngineLand and is generally considered to be the most respected search blogger around, is quoted in the NYT as saying: "This is the most promising thing I've seen in a while". He did qualify that by saying: "Whether they are going to threaten Microsoft, much less Google, that's another story." And his own post on SEL goes deep into this very question - well worth reading.

The big claims of Cuil were expounded on in the official PR. The title of the company's press release says it all: Cuil Launches Biggest Search Engine on the Web. In particular, the size of Cuil's index was talked up as its main claim to greatness - 120 billion web pages. But the whole press release is an exercise in Silicon Valley hyperbole. Here's just the intro:

"Cuil, a technology company pioneering a new approach to search, unveils its innovative search offering, which combines the biggest Web index with content-based relevance methods, results organized by ideas, and complete user privacy. Cuil (www.Cuil.com) has indexed 120 billion Web pages, three times more than any other search engine."

When you throw around terms like "pioneering", "significant breakthroughs", "ideal search engine", "complete user privacy", "next generation approach to search", ... well you better have a good product to back that up.

Some of the initial blog coverage of this story extended the hype. I must applaud Cuil's PR people for managing to get such overwhelming launch coverage, initially positive - although after bloggers actually started using the product the tone of the coverage changed accordingly.

The fact is, Cuil is a very ordinary product right now. In my own tests last night, I was left underwhelmed. Our official post today summed up our views: this is an average product that does not live up to its own hype, the NYT's hype, or the hype bestowed upon it by noted bloggers and those who thought they got a "scoop".

I still don't get it though - how come this startup got blanket coverage from tech news heavyweights, some of whom should know better than to buy into the hype? Did any of those publications actually test Cuil before writing up its greatness?

The Cuil homepage is a study in simplicity, with a black background, the Cuil logo, and the search box as its only major design elements. The search form is supposed to return typing suggestions, but this didn't work for us on any browser we tested. Maybe Cuil turned this off for the time being to take some load of its servers. Update: The typing suggestions are now working again.

Cuil takes a very different approach to displaying its results. Instead of a list, it displays results in three columns (though you can switch to a two-column view as well). Intuitively, it would seem that the most important results would be in the top left corner, but Cuil does not make this explicit. The top right spot is reserved for related searches, which usually displays either five or ten main suggestions and then, on mouse-over, slides open and reveals a more detailed selection.

Related Searches

Cuil prominently features its related searches, both in the box on the top right, as well as in a bar right underneath the search box. Overall, these seem to work surprisingly well. Thanks to the ability to quickly go down two levels of related searches, this function works better than the similar features in Yahoo Search, Ask, and Live Search, though they are not as extensive as the related searches on Clusty. Google tested a layout with prominently featured related searches last year, but hasn't made it a default feature.

The results Cuil displays in the related searches are usually relevant, though often, like in our search for 'Portland, OR,' it returned some strange results as well. For Portland, it seemed to think that we would also be interested in "Airlines of the United States" and "Regional Airline of the United States."

Unlike Google and its brethren, Cuil does not check your spelling and does not make an effort to suggest the correct search terms for you.

Test Searches

Of course, we couldn't do a comprehensive test of Cuil's 120 billion page index, but we did a couple of test searches and the results Cuil returned were often disappointing. Our search for 'Cessna 152,' one of the most popular general aviation training aircraft, gave us links to Wikipedia and the Cessna company on the big three search engines. Cuil, on the other hand, linked to an online store with manuals for sale.

On the other hand, searches for 'Linux' or other computing terms usually returned pretty good results and good suggestions for 'related searches'.'

Searching for people, however, was often a disappointment. While it worked great for historical figures, prominent bloggers were often nowhere to be found.

In our search for "Portland, OR," Cuil failed completely. Its top result was a link to a local Best Western hotel. Interestingly, a search for "Portland" only, however, gave us great results.

No Wikipedia?

One thing we noticed in our searches was the Cuil never returned any results from the Wikipedia. It isn't clear if Cuil is biased against displaying these, but it seems like a strange omission. Especially in our searches for historical figures, the results would have been far better if they had included Wikipedia articles. The top results for "Hitler Biography," for example, is a biography on BioAndLyrics, a site which copies the related Wikipedia article and suggests we also look at his discography.

Still Changing

One thing we noticed in our tests was that Cuil seems to be tweaking its servers constantly. Searches that returned no results last night now display thousands of links, while others, like our "Portland, OR" search above, stopped returning results completely for a while. Some of this could be explained by Cuil getting slammed with traffic right now (the site did slow down quite often during out tests), but that would also suggest that their system isn't quite as stable as it should be. Right now, for example, Cuil doesn't even display results for 'computers.'

Good, but not Great

Google, as well as Microsoft and Yahoo, profit from the simple fact that they have a far larger portfolio of sites to work with. A search for a city on the big three search engines, for example, will often display a map as one of the top results, while Cuil does not have that option. Similarly, searches for a stock symbol will show the performance of that stock in a little graph as one of the top results in Google, Live Search, and Yahoo Search, while Cuil, with some luck, returns a link to Yahoo's finance page as the top result, but without linking to the actual stock's page on Yahoo finance.

When it comes to current events, Google's results are simply fresher than Cuil's, thanks mostly to the results from Google News being displayed as part of the main search results.

Verdict

Overall, our experience with Cuil was a bit uneven. While the related searches often are very well chosen, the actual search results are disappointing. Cuil says it ranks results by the content on the pages only and not by popularity - however, it seems like this makes it a bit more susceptible to SEO manipulations, as some of our tests showed.

On some levels, Cuil doesn't feel like it is quite ready for prime time yet - even the links from its about page mostly display 404 errors. As of now, it's a worthy challenger and the size of its search index is impressive, but in the end, all consumers are going to care about is the quality of the search results, and there, Cuil's results are still too inconsistent.

UPDATE: Also see Wow, How Did Cuil Get So Much Publicity on Day 1?!

That, after all, was the real advance that Google brought to the search engine market. Early search engines like Altavista, Excite, or HotBot simply weren't able to return the most useful results to users.

However, we are also getting close to reaching a new crossroad again, where even Google's results are often polluted by spam. Yet, at the same time, the great promise of semantic search engines is still just a promise for now. Given the latest data about the search engine market and the end of the Microsoft/Yahoo negotiations over acquiring the Yahoo search business, Google is pretty much becoming the de-facto standard search engine for most people.

Chances are that anybody who wants to enter this market and compete with Google is simply going to be bought by the search giant, so if anything, Google's strong position is going to get even stronger in the foreseeable future.

For now, though, the real question about Google's search index is when it will reach a size of 1 googol...

Photo by Flickr user Mykl Roventine.

Also interesting is BooRah's Infobar, which automatically displays restaurant reviews from BooRah users together with the search results. BooRah won the prize for "Best Infobar."

Just this week, Yahoo opened up its search APIs even wider, when it announced a new program named BOSS (Build Your Own Search Service). While developers who participated in the SearchMonkey Challenge were restricted to mashing up their own data with results from Yahoo's search, BOSS will allow developers to use all of Yahoo's search index in (hopefully) innovative ways.

While Yahoo is clearly struggling in many ways today, it is great to see that it is still trying to foster innovation in the search space.

NEW relaunch of our forums!

NEW AltSearchEngines conference!

NEW Top 100 Alts list for June 2008! [more after the fold]

NEW staff writer Rafi Farber!

NEW Mobile Search expert Peggy!

NEW custom Weblin avatar!

NEW AltSearchEngines podcasts!

NEW ASE widget gallery!

NEW archives display!

NEW AltSearchEngines Stealth site!

NEW AltSearchEngines' mobile site!

NEW sponsors, and old sponsors!

NEW my favorite post of the year,

and much, much, much more!

Please join us on Monday as we kick off our second year!!

*ok, this one's not true. Try MSN Live.

Sputtr

Charles pointed out that although Sputtr is a great app, it is difficult for mainstream users to grok. For one thing ordinary users won't know how to make sense of all the logos. Also people outside the tech industry will not know many of the brands of the smaller search companies. So Charles suggested that a virtual world approach could be the answer, whereby different alt search engines are represented in a 3D world according to the type of search they provide. For example if you are looking for a job, then there will be a virtual representation of this in the 3D world and a number of job search engines available to meet that need.

This "federated search" approach, as someone in the audience termed it, is one way for the hundreds of small search startups to increase their overall market share. Another approach is to create a common platform for alts, using APIs and UI standards (suggested over lunch to me by Morgan Snyder from allth.at).

Also on the opening discussion panel were myself, Nitin Karandikar from The Software Abstractions Blog, and Henrick Kac from BlogDimension. Nitin recently wrote a post entitled Cooperation of Alt Search Engines: A Manifesto (original here), which outlined 5 possibilities for alts to cooperate - e.g. "Search Federations of complementary ASEs".

Opening panel, photo by Boris Veldhuijzen van Zanten

Conclusion

The overarching theme to AltSearchEngines Day is to encourage the alts to band together and help each other reach the mainstream audience. Anyone who regularly reads AltSearchEngines will know that there is a ton of innovation in search, literally hundreds of niche and vertical search startups. So this effort to join together to compete with (or complement) the likes of Google and Microsoft is very commendable - and as I mentioned in the panel, ReadWriteWeb heartily supports it.

Special thanks to Charles Knight for the vision and pulling this day together, and also LA Lassek and the SeeqPod team for organizing the event. Thanks as well to the sponsors of this event: SeeqPod, UpTake, HealthPricer, MatchPoint, GoPubMed, BlogDimension.

When I was doing the intros at the start, I noted that Charles is "the voice of alternative search engines" in this industry. He really is galvinising and leading the alts forward as a group. Be sure to subscribe to AltSearchEngines to track this initiative.

The AltSearchEngines' Get Together (by invitation only)

When?

Monday, April 21st, from 7am to 5pm

Where?

Downtown San Francisco, CA (address will be advised upon registration)

Why?

Because mainstream Search conferences cater to the major search engines.

Agenda:

7:00 - 9:00 Social Coffee
9:00 - 9:45 Keynote: AltSearchEngines
10:00 - 10:45 HealthPricer with Spock and SurfCanyon
11:00 - 11:45 UpTake with FriendFeed, Eurekster, OrganizedWisdom and Spock
12:00 - 2:00 Lunch on your own.
2:00 - 2:45 SeeqPod with Kosmix, Pixsy, Matchpoint, and Healia
3:00 - 3:45 TBA
4:00 - 4:45 Powerset, Cognition, BooRah, EEGGI and True Knowledge

How much?

So far this is a free event thanks to the generosity of our sponsors:

Gold Sponsor - SeeqPod
Silver Sponsor - UpTake
Bronze Sponsor - HealthPricer
GoPubMed

Dress code:

Jeans to business casual. "Suits" will be turned away at the door.

Errata:

Search Engines - Please plan on bringing at least 50 business cards.

Contact information:

Charles Knight
Charles@ReadWriteWeb.com

Here's how The Search Race works:

1) You need to sign up for a free Search Race account before you can vote.

2) You can vote for as many search engines as you like, but you cannot vote for a single search engine more than once.

3) You can submit new search engines.

4) The Search Race will continue until we get to the Search Engine of the Year.

This probably should be called the Day Without Google Search, as like Marshall I can't live without Gmail (which I use to manage all my email accounts). Even so, it will be a struggle for me not to use Google Search, simply because it is still IMHO the best search engine around. It's fast, simple and usually delivers me the search results I want.

However I'm all for the idea of experimenting with new search apps - and this is what ASE's Day Without Google Search is really about. We ran a similar day last year and got some great comments and discussion on alternative search engines.

I'm going to try out some of the new semantic search engines tomorrow, April 1st. How about you? Leave your thoughts in the comments here or on AltSearchEngines.

1. Why 100? Note: The entire list is available at the end of this post.

The silly reason is because it is next in line after the 1 Search Engine of the Year (SEY), which is selected from amongst the 10 total Search Engines of the Month (see Dec 2007), but less than the 1,000 that we launched with last June.

The serious reason is that it takes a good 100 in order to show you the diversity of search engines out there - just look at the descriptions of the attached file(s). The best People search engines, Job, Health, Media, Local, Social, Semantic, Image, etc., etc. The alternative search engines are nothing if not diverse. But still, at 10 minutes each, it would take you more than 16 hours to check them all out! (I only know of one person who regularly does that - do you?)

2. How are the Top 100 selected?

For the AltSearchEngines list, this is how: I start with the Top 100 from February and add every search engine that was displayed on AltSearchEngines during the month. In February, there were 49 new search engines shown, so I start with 149. Can you imagine knocking down 149 good choices to 100? It’s not easy! But to answer the question, I delete search engines until I am down to 100 again, and that’s how the best search engines get integrated into the March list.

3. What about the Search Engine of the Month (SEM)?

Same principle - I look back on February’s news stories to see which search engine had the most significant development - in my humble opinion. Last month’s SEM was ChaCha.

4. What if I don’t like your choices?

First, leave a comment - as an individual. Second, be prepared. We will soon be launching our newest feature, a Top 100 list where you the reader will get to vote for your favorite engines. Then we’ll compare my choices to yours (as a group).

5. How do I find old versions of the List?

Most are under the Top 100 tab at the top of this page (June 2007 - February 2008), and the very old ones are in the ReadWriteWeb archives (Jan-May 2007), but of course older lists tend to be very outdated.

6. What if I want you to look at another alternative search engine this month?

Email it to me at at: Charles@ReadWriteWeb.com, or leave a comment if you want others to see it.

7. What if I have a question about the Top 100 not mentioned here?

Join the AltSearchEngines Forum and, once inside, click on the “Ask Charles” tab.

8. Who is not on the Top 100 list? (or, Why don’t I see my favorite search engine?)

Good question! My guesstimate is that 1,300 search engines are not shown. We have no list of those for you, so we plan to start a Master database where together we can create a directory of all alternative search engines.

9. I don’t want to talk to you. How can I talk to other readers?

Great! Join the AltSearchEngines Forum and interact with the other ASE readers.

10. Who is the Search Engine of the Month for March?

It’s

EveryZing

In February, EveryZing launched two very exciting uses for their technology. Not just new tweaks or basic features, but major new applications / products: ezSearch and ezSEO. Rather than just write the information all over again, please go to the posts that that covered it all here for ezSEO and here for ezSearch.

Get the entire Top 100 list here as .xls The Top 100 Alternative Search Engines, March 2008

and here as .pdf The Top 100 Alternative Search Engines, March 2008

The crux of Morville's presentation was that we're "at the crossroads of ubiquitous computing and the Internet", but "the user experience is out of control, and findability is the real story."

Findability in the Real World

Morville defines findability as "the quality of being locatable or navigable". It's becoming more important as information overload takes hold and mobile devices become more popular. As we've written about a lot on this blog, we're in an age where "a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention" (Herbert Simon quote). We also have many more alternate interfaces to information - and this will expand well past smart phones in the future.

So what kind of products will help us achieve findability? Morville says it won't be AI (e.g. a next gen Microsoft Bob) and he also says it won't be visualization technologies (something that perhaps our own Charles Knight might disagree with!). Although he says eventually visualization may play a part. He says business intelligence systems show a way forward - software that find patterns. He also says librarians are important, where "metedata is sexy" - indeed, see Marshall Kirkpatrick's post on sexy librarians!

Morville says it's about bringing together things like tags and taxanomies, not keeping them apart. He points to sites like Etsy, where users can classify their items and tag. He says the future of search will be "a future where search and browsing work together". He refers to a Marcia Bates article about "berrypicking".

Examples of Future Search, Right Now

Morville picks out a number of web products that he says point to the future of search and finadability. One company he mentions is Endeca, a "guided navigation" service which he says mirrors the way our pschology works when searching for information. Buzzillions is another app Morville highlights, which again provides ways for people to narrow and find what they're looking for.

Clusty is a hybrid solution, where humans design the taxonomy but there are automated algorithms to categorize.

Google, says Morville, "is really struggling". However he also says that Universal Search is a good exploration of bringing people into Google's algorithms - as an example a search for 'diabetes' guides people to different types of information.

He also mentions Flickr's clustered tags.

He ends by saying they we "need a lot more innovation". Google Book Search is an example, as is Everyzing which has searchable podcasts and interesting ways to browse it. So this is all expanding the "searchable web" - into audio, video, etc.

He also says that it won't be limited to the digital environment - more and more physical and digital worlds being melded together. aka "Internet of Objects".

Conclusion

In conclusion, he says we need to continue to focus on usability in this new world of findability - "but I hope we don't stop there".

An enlightening talk by Peter Morville and really demonstrated some of the groundbreaking web apps showing the way to the future of search. For more on these topics, subscribe to ReadWriteWeb's network blog AltSearchEngines.

Best Search Engine Research Blog
Breakout Blog of 2007
Most Giving Search Blogger (for editor Charles Knight)

Best Search Engine Research Blog
ResourceShelf
SEO by the SEA
SEOFastStart
HamletBatista
AltSearchEngines

Breakout Blog of 2007
Dosh Dosh
BlogStorm
SEOish
AltSearchEngines
VanessaFoxNude
Tropical SEO

Most Giving Search Blogger
Bill Slawski
Aaron Wall
Charles Knight
Danny Sullivan
Barry Schwartz
Rand Fishkin
Kevin Newcomb
Tamar Weinberg
Lisa Barone

1. You ask a query and then receive your search results:

2. You will see an icon in the top-right of search results that says "Meet Others who asked the same query". If you click on the button, you enter into a room (if the room exists) of people who have a) asked the same or similar query; and b) decided to post a message to the room.

3. You can either post a message or contact someone who has already posted a message. To post, you only need to authenticate your email address - there is no other personal info or registration required. You can choose the method you'd like to be contacted: via email (which is masked), or IM (Skype of MSN). So if a user has IM contact enabled, you can start chatting with that person with one click.

There is a voting system too, which together with message age determines how long messages stay in the room for.

Conclusion

Hakia MO kind of resembles Yahoo! Answers, in that you are basically asking a question and then getting feedback from other users. However Hakia points out that MO is not a collaborative search result voting system. They are calling MO a "peer-to-peer transactional platform". Rather than Yahoo! Answers, Hakia says that MO most resembles Craigslist - because "users post content and there are no registration requirements."

In evaluating Hakia HO, I'm in two minds about the usefulness of social networking in a search engine. On one hand, it enables you to join groups of like-minded users in a very specific topic. I'm a big Velvet Underground fan for example, so if I search for "velvet underground" then it might be useful and/or enjoyable for me to join a "room" full of VU fans and begin conversations.

On the other hand, social networking is not something I am usually looking for in a search engine. I use search engines to gather information - in and out. Once I get what I came for, I'm outa there. So, will enough users join topic-focused rooms to make Hakia's MO a compelling feature?

I guess we'll find out, but it's an open question worth seeing the results of. Google would probably be very interested to see if they can integrate social networking into their search homepage, given their new OpenSocial APIs. Although, Hakia says they have a patent application on MO - so maybe Google won't be able to do it anyway!

What do you think: do search and social networking go together? Or should they be kept separate?

Disclosure: Hakia is a sponsor of our network blog AltSearchEngines and recently they signed up as a Read/WriteWeb sponsor for November.