Cuil Is Cool But Not Yet Hot

Cuil is the "coolest" new search engine available.

Challengers to Google’s search dominance seem to spring up from time to time with each promising something different from what the Mountain View, California company delivers. Mahalo has tried to present a fresh alternative to the Big G as have Wikiseek, Gigiblast, and a handful of others, but none have seriously threatened Google’s leadership.

Now, a new search engine by the name of Cuil (pronounced Cool) promises to do what others have failed to do, claiming to have three times as many indexed pages as Google. Moreover, unlike Google, Cuil promises to make users’ search private, a subject of increasing concern for people who value confidential web surfing.

Promising to deliver a fresh approach to search with new algorithms based on an entirely new architecture, Cuil claims to index the entire internet, not just a part of it. The company says on their info page:

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.

Then we offer you helpful choices and suggestions until you find the page you want and that you know is out there. 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. With Cuil, your search history is always private.

My first attempts at using Cuil this morning were rebuffed as I encountered numerous error messages and found broken links on the navigation bar. When I returned later, I was able to successfully enter a few keywords and observe the results. Unlike Google which lists Search Engine Result Pages (SERPs) in successive order, the results on Cuil were in three columns, making it easy to scan what was returned. In many cases, related photographs were included, something Google does not provide.

Cuil also promises to drill down into the content on a web page, apparently with less emphasis on title tags when returning search results. Of course, you’ll have to experiment with this new search tool to grasp just how differently it works from Google.

Cuil management is made up of former Google employees underscoring that a career with the Big G isn’t for everyone. The husband and wife team of Anna Patterson and Tom Costello head up Cuil who, along with Louse Monier and Russell Power built the application. Cuil is backed by $33 million in venture capital and is based in San Francisco.

Cuil is an old Irish word for knowledge and, interestingly, when you search for the word “cuil” on Cuil the results do not include a link to the search engine.

(Soure: Cuil.com and wire service reports)