Is This What the “Cool” Kids will be Using?
Well, some past Google employees have gotten together and started a new search engine. Obviously, this is no easy task, and nobody has yet successfully put a dent into Google’s dominance. The site is www.cuil.com. Cuil, pronounced “cool” is backed by $33 million in venture capital, and comes from the Gaelic word for “knowledge” and “hazel”. They claim to index over 120 billion Web pages. It will be interesting to see if they can carve out any type of success, and hopefully, it will be “cool” to use Cuil.
By the way, “Leadpile” displays very nicely in Cuil… please take a peek…
Apparently Cuil was not quite ready for launch during the first day or two – many medium long tail queries did not return results at all, and even general queries returned way fewer results than they should have considering Cuil’s claims of having indexed so many pages already. They did improve somewhat afterward, however, and seem to be picking up more results and increasing relevance as more people have been testing out the engine.
In the long run, I hope they get things together and perform well enough to compete with the major search engines and then maybe do some advertising. I would like to see more serious competitors to Google in order to hold their power in check and encourage more transparency overall.
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