Cuil, a new search engine launched last July 28, 2008, is managed and developed largely by former employees of Google, Anna Patterson and Russell Power.   The name ‘Cuil’ is pronounced as “cool” (according to creator), and it is a search engine that organizes web pages by content and displays relatively long entries along with thumbnail pictures for many results.  The CEO and co-founder, Tom Costello, has worked for IBM and others.

I saw the news of launching the Cuil search engine last Nov,  and it was the only news I read about this search engine.  I was thinking the Cuil would have good prospect since it was managed by former Google stars.  Unfortunately, everything proofs that the giant Google is hard to defeat.  Cuil claimed that it “searches more pages on the Web than anyone else—three times as many as Google and ten times as many as Microsoft.”  However, I failed to get some of the websites indexed there!   Therefore I doubt if this statement is valid.

Cuil’s ranking argthorim is different from Google, which is quite unsurprising to me.   The main difference I can see is about the link popularity.   The Cuil emphasised that popularity is useful, but not always important.  Popularity is useful, but has dominated search results so heavily that it gets harder and harder to find the page searcher 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 searcher’s question.   But for a deeper search, establishing relevancy is more than a numbers game.  It is the main things differentiate with the Google.  Google counts heavily on ‘number of votes’ you have and the quality of these ‘votes’.

Feel free to visit Cuil at www.cuil.com
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Written by Eugene Wong on April 26, 2009.