Cuil Search Engine

Cuil is the latest search engine that has hit the internet world and many bloggers are referring it as "Google Search Killer" (which I personally do not think is the case), but honestly I had mixed feelings about it. It has been started by ex-Google employees Anna Patterson, Russell Power, and Tom Costello (Anna Patterson's husband). They also claim to have a much cheaper way to index web pages. The company has raised $33 million in venture capital.

I do not know how well Cuil search perform in a long run but these are my personal observations on day one (July 28, 2008).

Cool Features of Cuil:-

• Very nice multi column magazine-style layout including images in search results.
• Cuil has 120 billion Web pages, more than any search engine.
• It will not store our search history/IP addresses which is a big "Yay" for people concerned about the on the internet.
• It also proclaims an inbuilt intellisense to yield better search results.
• Since Cuil does not base it's results on how sites link each other(Google uses link patterns as a part of their algorithm), it will be good for the internet world and reduce spam linking on blogs and websites.
• Cuil does offers an "Explore By Category" section in its search results.
• Cuil's low cost method of running a search engine.

Things I did not like:-

• The site went down multiple times as they were probably not expecting a huge volume on day one. I am sure most people were checking it out rather than a long term commitment.
• I searched for the word "Cuil" and it returned no search results which I thought was quite odd.
• Less than half the times I found what I was searching for, there is certainly a room for improvement in their search algorithim. Several less popular sites were not showing up even when I specifically searched by their name. Sometimes the thumbnails within the search results were also off or irrelevant.
• Cuil (pronounced "cool") itself is not a great name and they could have purchased another short domain name by spending some money which was more easier to pronounce and remember.

So the score on Day One Google v/s Cuil is ... Cuil 0 Google 1 On day one, Google outpreformed them both in search relevancy and result returns.

I somehow feel that we will see a much better response and search results from Cuil in the days to come as today their servers were literally bombarded. Anna Paterson in the year 2002-2003 had written a search engine used by the Internet Archives, which was eventually was sold to Google itself.