A new search engine called Cuil was launched today (July 28th). It is developed and run by the husband-and-wife team of Stanford professor Tom Costello and former Google search architect Anna Patterson. I quickly hopped onto the site to check it out, first thing I noticed is that it is very clean, a bit too clean assuming it just launched and had to start somewhere small first. It claims to be the biggest search engine, while I won’t doubt that will or may happen in the future, it certainly is not the biggest yet.
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On the bright side, each search will be accompanied by an image whenever possible which makes the search experience more enjoyable as opposite to just plain text results. Costello also stated that the new search engine crawls and ranks pages differently compare to Google’s flagship search engine and it heavily focuses on the “contextual” of a page. As stated from the About Cuil page “When we find a page with your keywords, we stay on that page and analyze the rest of its content, its concepts, their inter-relationships and the page’s coherency.”.
Onto the dark side.
Speed-wise I don’t feel any improvement over searching through Google, some times its often slower than Google (maybe everyone is trying out this new search engine?). Many people have also reported that searches were not accurate. I tried to search for Cuil hoping to find more info about the search engine (yes I know there’s an link called About Cuil on the very first page, but correct me if I’m wrong but shouldn’t its own page get indexed as well? About one in a ten searches results in “We didn’t find any results for
All and all I think there is still a lot of work to be done for Cuil in order to even convince people that it is capable of searching if its claimed to be the “biggest” search engine. Right now it just doesn’t stand a chance. I will definately keep my eyes on this.
