Cuil New Search Engine Launches
Cuil, pronounced “cool,” has officially launched.
All the kool kids are talking about it. The question is whether anyone will use it.
As a new search engine, Cuil is a longshot. It’s no Google Killer.
Check out Cuil.com. Google needs the competition. But don’t expect a revolutionary search experience. The results page looks very much like Guy Kawasaki’s Alltop.com.
Cuil was created by former Google engineers Anna Patterson, Russell Power and Louis Monier, who picked up $33 million in venture capital to launch the search engine.
So how is Cuil different than Google? They’re claiming bragging rights for search index size: 120 billion Web pages. While Patterson says that’s 3X the size of Google’s index, most people acknowledge that size doesn’t matter.
As Google’s official blog notes, many pages not indexed either point to similar content or would diminish the quality of its search results in some other way. T
Of course, Cuil can’t use PageRank to organize results. So Cuil apparently assesses the actual content of a page.
Cuil’s results are most similar to universal search, displaying photos horizontally across the page. Sidebars can be clicked on to learn more about related topics.
In a nod to privacy, Cuil promises not to retain users’ search histories or surfing patterns.