Ex-Google employees create search rival, Cuil
July 29, 2008 – 8:33 am by Nick Bodmer
Cuil, a new search engine created by many former Google employees, recently went live. Cuil (pronounced like “cool”) is a search engine that differs from Google in two very important ways. First, page ranking is not determined by popularity, but instead by content analysis. (Google’s algorithm relies on how often other sites link to a page to determine it’s rank).
“Popularity is useful, but has dominated search results so heavily that it gets harder and harder to find the page you want, especially if your search is a complex one. Cuil respects popular pages and recognizes that for many simple searches, popularity is an easy answer to your question. But for a deeper search, establishing relevancy is more than a numbers game.”
Secondly, Cuil does not keep search records on file. If you are curious as to why you should care about this, please see the current YouTube (owned by Google) vs. Viacom lawsuit.
“…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 cookie. Your search history is your business, not ours. We don’t need to keep logs of our users’ search activity, so we don’t.”
Many people will appreciate the layout of Cuil, as search results are presented in a very pleasing, easy to read 2 or 3 column format. In addition, most search results are accompanied by an image. You are also given the ability to drill down by category, a feature that could become useful, but does not always seem to show relevant information (see below).
While searching by context is an interesting concept, it has yet to be proven. That coupled with the fact that my own searching habits have been optimized to work with a “Google system” leads me to believe that it will be a long time before I make a switch for my daily searching.
