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Cuil, a search engine to compete with Google?

By Jon | July 29, 2008

A New Search Engine in Town

I know what you are thinking… “There is always a new search engine in town” and you are correct but the difference is that this one has been created by ex-Google employees and the founder of Altavista (Anna Patterson, Russell Power, Louis Monier, Vince Sollitto, Pete Szymanski, Bruce Baumgart and Tom Costello). Does this really mean anything, well I think that we will just have to see. The search engine is called Cuil (an old irish word that means knowledge and is pronounced cool) and has a few features that I quite enjoyed.

You have a choice between a 2 or 3 column display with a thumbnail and a larger description which is quite nice but could be a problem to SEO experts and the click throughs.

I do like the way that it splits results into different sections which is quite similar to the Google “Searches Related To:” at the the bottom of pages but I do like the way that Cuil has this option at the top in ‘Tabs’.

Cuil has also got some other nice small features such as the search by category (’drilldowns’). This is something that I think users could benefit from and the layout is fantastic.

Will it compete with Google?

I doubt it to be honest, in time there may be a top 4 or 5 search engines that cuil can join but I think that Google is too powerful for Cuil. The recent (past couple of years) features of Google especially the universal search with one box listings have become so useful to searchers along with the ability for companies to have details on Google without a website. Let’s not forget that everyone has heard of Google, ‘Google it’ but Cuil have a very tough marketing campaign ahead.

Cuil Information

Cuil index - 121,617,892,992 websites at the moment (claiming to search more than any other search engine including Google)

Relies solely on the websites content and relevance rather than popularity metrics (PageRank?)

A completely new architecture rather than simply tweaking past search engines

‘Drilldowns’ in a ‘Explore By Category’ feature for a more specific / similar search. This feature also lets you hover phrases for a definition.

‘Tabs’ is simply tabs across the top of the search results to allow users the ability for a deeper search.

Navigation suggestion…. we’ve all seen this before with all search engines…

Cuil’s own summary of features:

Summary of Cuil’s features:

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