Cuil is the latest search engine to rival juggernaut Google. Pronounced “Cool,” Cuil claims to be able to find 3 times as many pages as Google can; as of today, 121617892992 webpages. This fact alone does not make Cuil a superior search engine. The vast majority of users are only looking at the first 10 results anyways, so anything beyond those lose their significance rapidly. Cuil’s management team claim the search engine ranks pages by their relevance as opposed to their subjective popularity.

The founders of Cuil are made up of PhD computer science graduates, and ex-Google employees. They believe they can develop a better search engine than the champion, Google. They also claim the search engine to be completely private; that is, they do no track their users search history. If this is true, it will debilitate the potential power of user analysis. Alike Google, the interface is simple and clean. Unlike Google, Cuil is taking advantage of the power of imagery. Each result has a picture alongside it, which essentially “puts a face beside the name.” This may in fact be a hit with the average search engine user, who will be able to relate with each result just be recognizing the picture. I have done some comparative searches between Cuil and Google using the same key phrases. The results were different, but were Cuil’s better? Personally, I don’t think so. But it does harness some unique features, some of which may just in fact become a grand slam. Why not check it out for yourself?

Go the the Cuil homepage here

This entry was posted on Monday, August 18th, 2008 at 9:48 am and is filed under Search Engines. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.