Google’s “Cuil” new competitor: not so cool for Google?

by Alex Zaharov-Reutt

Monday, 28 July 2008

Page 1 of 3 ! Cuil, pronounced “cool”, is a brand new search engine claiming an index of more than 120 billion pages, and founded by former Google employees that were search engine stars to begin with. How cool is Cuil, and will it survive a duel with the big G? Hear ye, hear ye: a new search engine has come to town, and the buzz is that it has the biggest and best chance yet of truly challenging Google, the first time any new search engine has really had that kind of buzz. Available at cuil.com, the site tells us in its “about us” section that Cuil is an old Irish word for knowledge, and that if you want knowledge, “ask Cuil”. The founders of Cuil were former Google employees and were big search stars before Google came along, and it’s their pedigree both with Google and before it that have the pundits thinking that Cuil has every chance of truly being cool. Billed as “the world’s biggest search engine”, with 180 billion pages spidered and over 120 billion of those included in the actual Cuil index, the founders claim that “the Internet has grown” and that they think “it’s time search did too.” That 120 billion-plus page figure is claimed to be more than three times what Google indexes and ten times the number of pages Google searches, although Google recently did put out a release saying it has more than 1 trillion links in its database, although links are not necessarily individual pages. Cuil also takes a major dig at Google’s ultra successful and ultra popular “Pagerank” concept, an idea which gave Google its undeniable accuracy that everyone else, so far, has tried so hard to beat. Cuil’s attack on “Pagerank” is evident when it says in its “about us” page: “Rather than rely on superficial popularity metrics, Cuil searches for and ranks pages based on their content and relevance. When we find a page with your keywords, we stay on that page and analyze the rest of its content, its concepts, their inter-relationships and the page’s coherency.” What Cuil says it does next: “Then we offer you helpful choices and suggestions until you find the page you want and that you know is out there. We believe that analyzing the Web rather than our users is a more useful approach, so we don’t collect data about you and your habits, lest we are tempted to peek. With Cuil, your search history is always private.” So what else does Cuil promise, and who are these mysterious founders? Please read on to page 2. << First page <   1 2 3 Next page > Last page - Post your comment >>

 

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