Cuil Challenges Google for Searching Power
Everybody knows Google. It’s such a part of our culture now that even former technophobes find themselves turning the search powerhouse into a verb on the regular (how many times do you find yourself saying “just Google it”?).
Many companies have tried to compete for the search crown, but none have had the simplicity and innate “smarts” to keep people coming back for more. Soon, though, Google may have some real competition.
Cuil (pronounced “cool”) is a new search engine developed by Anna Patterson, a former developer at Google. According to Patterson, Cuil is “at least three times the size of Google’s index.” (However, there’s no real way to know, since Google stopped counting (at least publicly) in 2005.)
The advent of this new search was recently made public, and it’s causing some stir in the technology industry. Patterson asserts that Cuil more actively searches the content of the page, rather than the ranking and rating system that Google relies on.
My Snap Judgement
I searched for Small Dog Electronics, and here’s what I found:
– Cuil looks extremely clean, thanks to the column layout (you can choose between 2 or 3 columns)
– It’s also nice to see images along with text
– It seemed to find more relevant results, although they weren’t all recent (many were several months old; e.g. blog posts from February ’08, and even as far back as 2004 on the first few pages)
– It doesn’t seem as robust as Google, but looks promising.
I’m going to keep searching Cuil to experiment. I like the way it looks and feels so far, so the only way to know if it will work fro me is to keep searching, and weigh the results!
Try it for yourself and let us know what you think:
www.cuil.com
Screenshot:
