Cuil stuff?

Posted on 11th August 2008 at 1:36 pm by Christopher Tate

A new search engine has joined the fray, Cuil.com, set up by several former Google employees. Cuil believe that they can seriously compete with the worlds most popular search engine, but can they?

Cuil, a new search engine (pronounced 'Cool') built by a group of former Google employees, was launched on July 28th and is being marketed as the alternative to Google. It is the creation of Anna Patterson, who while at Google developed the Teragoogle indexing system, and her husband Tom Costello, who has previously developed search engines for IBM and Stanford.

Patterson says that one of the reasons why other search engines such as Yahoo! and MSN have failed to compete with Google is due to the number of pages they index. In theory, Cuil should have the edge on Google, as their engine searches for results on 120 billion websites as opposed to Google's 40 billion. Also, Cuil's index is claimed to be about three times the size of Google's (Unfortunately Google do not disclose the size of their index, so we'll have to take their word for it).

As part of it's desire to be different, the layout of Cuil search results differs from it's competitors, offering a results page with a greater amount of text and some images, evoking a magazine feel as opposed to a straight list. Whether this approach will become popular remains to be seen, but with Yahoo! encouraging images and tools to be implemented on their search results, we could see further adoption and development of this approach.

Of course, a search engine is only as good as the relevancy of its results. If a search for 'UK domestic policy' shows up results for the minutes of a WI meeting in Guildford, then some tweaking of the software is needed. Some early users have complained that Cuil is doing just that, throwing up random results, so don't make it your default search engine just yet. However we will be keeping an eye on Cuil, because as with many things in life, web technologies sometimes need time to mature. It will be interesting to see how Google's alternative is doing a year or so down the line.

File under: google yahoo!

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