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How cool is Cuil.com?
When I first heard about cuil.com (pronounced 'cool-dot-com'), I did two things. The first is quite obvious visit the search engine and the second was to 'google' the word 'cuil'. Shockingly enough, google.com, always proud of being the world's largest search engine gave, as its second search result, 'Cuil - The World's Biggest Search Engine'! This all new search engine, launched on July 28 and claiming to be the world's largest search engine with a database of more than 121,617,892,992 web pages, does have a sleek look with its trendy colour combination and fonts. Cuil claims it has a higher number of indexed pages compared to Google. But does bigger necessarily mean better? So, Cuil has a lot to live up to and it knows this. Google is one of the most recognised brands on the planet and the most powerful brand globally with a brand value of US$66.5m, according to US research and consulting firm Millward Brown. Cuil.com is headed by Anna Patterson, a former engineer at Google.com. Her last Internet search engine was so impressive that industry leader Google Inc. bought the technology in 2004 to upgrade its own system. She believes her latest invention is even more valuable - only this time it's not for sale. Patterson instead intends to upstage Google, which she quit in 2006 to develop a more comprehensive and efficient way to scour the internet. Cuil had kept a low profile while Patterson, her husband, Tom Costello, and two other former Google engineers - Russell Power and Louis Monier - searched for better ways to search. Patterson believes that Cuil has at least three times the size of Google's index, although there is no way to know for certain. Google stopped publicly quantifying its index's breadth nearly three years ago when the catalogue spanned 8.2 billion Web pages. Cuil won't divulge the formula it has developed to cover a wider swath of the Web with far fewer computers than Google. And Google isn't ceding the point: Spokeswoman Katie Watson said her company still believes its index is the largest. After getting inquiries about Cuil, Google asserted on its blog that it regularly scans through 1 trillion unique Web links. But Google said it doesn't index them all because they either point to similar content or would diminish the quality of its search results in some other way. A search index's scope is important because information, pictures and content can't be found unless they're stored in a database. But Cuil believes it will outshine Google in several other ways, including its method for identifying and displaying pertinent results. Rather than trying to mimic Google's method of ranking the quantity and quality of links to Web sites, Patterson says Cuil's technology drills into the actual content of a page. And Cuil's results will be presented in a more magazine-like format instead of just a vertical stack of Web links. Cuil's results are displayed with more photos spread horizontally across the page and include sidebars that can be clicked on to learn more about topics related to the original search request. Finally, Cuil is hoping to attract traffic by promising not to retain information about its users' search histories or surfing patterns - something that Google does, much to the consternation of privacy watchdogs. Cuil is just the latest in a long line of Google challengers. Google has become so synonymous with Internet search that it may no longer matter how good Cuil or any other challenger is, said Gartner Inc. (IT) analyst Allen Weiner. "Search has become as much about branding as anything else," Weiner said. "I doubt (Cuil) will be keeping anyone at Google awake at night."
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