Cuil – New search engine to challenge Google

Cuil, a brand new search engine, launched recently, is pitched as the world’s latest, largest and fastest search engine.  At the time of launch itself, Cuil claims to have 120 billion pages or three times the volume of Google Index.

Cuil has been founded by the husband-wife duo of Stanford professor Tom Costello and former Google search architect Anna Patterson. Originally called Cuill (Irish for knowledge), pronounced as cool, has now been named Cuil. Summary of Cuil’s features as claimed by Cuil: • Biggest Internet search engine—Cuil has indexed 120 billion Web pages, 3x more than any other search engine • Organized results—Cuil’s magazine-style layout separates results by subject and allows further search by concept or category • Different results—Unlike other search engines, Cuil ranks results by the content on each page, not its popularity • Complete privacy protection—Cuil does not keep any personally identifiable information on users or their search histories Cuil does have some interesting feature to offer. A search for dogs, for example, will return category results for “water dogs,” “crossbreed”, “cocker spaniel” and so on. Some of these related terms do not include the term “dog”. Similarly by clicking on New York, one would get tabbed results for recommended refinements like New York Times, New York City, New York Yankees and so on. Cuil works to understand how words are related to get more relevant results and it tries to categorize and file a web page, even if the category name doesn’t appear on the site.

Will Cuil overtake Google? Though Cuil has the potential to compete with Google, in it’s present form, it lacks certain important features that we have become used to in Google, like the advanced search for one. In Google, you can create queries to search by file types, restrict your search to a particular website and stuff like that.  Cuil lacks any kind of advance search at present. But, Cuil will probably come up with similar or even better features in the future. Anyway, you can expect some good competition in the coming days. Remember, it took Google quite some time to surpass Alta Vista and Yahoo in the search wars.

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