AllEver.com

Most talks in Tech town since yesterday are sure to include a mention to Cuil. Pronounced “cool”, a newly launched search engine, built and founded by former Google employees. Cuil claims to be indexing more of the web than any of its rivals, including Google. It also promises an innovative approach to searching, unlike any other engines out there.

Cuil co-founders Anna Patterson, Louis Monier and Russell Power are clearly set out to take on their former employer, Google. Although Cuil’s technology may very well be able to do that - I don’t quite understand all the “look at me, I can do it better than Google” approach. Read this for instance. When you start typing a search term in Cuil, auto-complete sets in suggesting possible search terms. It can even suggest a direct website link. This is described on Cuil as “We let you look before you leap, because not everyone feels lucky.”, an obvious reference to Google’s “I Feel Lucky” search button directing you to the most likely possible match of your search to a website. It’s a little funny, not in a bad way though.

Getting passed the “I want Google’s head on a platter” hype, Cuil does seem promising. They claim to have new search architecture and algorithms in place which will provide for better, more relevant results. Twiceler, the search engine’s spider is set out to crawl every page on the World Wide Web. Already indexing more than 121 billion web pages. Popularity will not be the main factor of assessing a web page’s relevance to a search term. Their deeper content analysis Cuil says will provide for better results.

Another aspect of searching with Cuil which sets it apart from competitors is Privacy. Very simply put in their own words “when you search with Cuil, we do not collect any personally identifiable information, period. We have no idea who sends queries: not by name, not by IP address, and not by cookies”. Several competing search engines, store users’ web search history on their servers, claiming it helps them provide more relevant content. Cuil does not.

Venturing from the simple search box at the front page of Cuil to the results display, the user interface is unlike most you’ve grown to expect when you search the web. Instead of the conventional list style results, you get 3 columns by default, which can be switched to 2. For each resulting web page, there is a title, some of the contained text, and a picture. A format you’d most likely expect at News websites displaying their articles.

An “Explore by Category” box on the top-right, allows for quick searches on other subjects belonging in categories your current search is also listed in. Tabs on the top of the page provide quick switches to other relevant results.

Another thing that caught my attention though, is Cuil uses e-mail. I mean there are no forms there, besides the search form. If you want your website included in their index, you have to send them e-mail! If you want to inquire about employment, send feedback, make questions, just send them e-mail! They even use the same e-mail addresses to accept feedback on different issues, which means they actually have to read the messages instead of automating actions and replies. Impressive.

Still Google does continue to claim it indexes more on the web than Cuil, without revealing any numbers. And many users point out Google continues to offer more search results for the same search terms. Considering Cuil launched just yesterday, I think we all ought to wait a while and see. It may just be a bit to early to provide any constructive criticism.

Has anyone been using Cuil lately? I’d like to hear what you think of it!

This entry was posted by Pavlos on Tuesday, July 29th, 2008 at 9:21 am and is filed under Internet, News, Technology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.