Is that Cuil? Or is it?

A few months ago, a new search engine called Cuil came alive. It was founded by Anna Patterson an ex-Google employee) in conjunction with her husband, Tom Costello, a former IBM employee, and Russell Power and Louis Monier, two other ex-Google engineers. As the new kid on the block, Cuil did not have a good start, the servers went down on the first day because of high traffic demands, and people still don’t know how to pronounce the name.

Cuil’s founders say that the name is pronounced “Cool”, and it has a special meaning: “Cuil is the Gaelic word for both knowledge and hazel, and features prominently in ancient legend. One famous story tells of a salmon that ate nine hazelnuts that had fallen into the Fountain of Wisdom and thereby gained all the knowledge in the world. Whoever ate the salmon would acquire this knowledge.”

The main advantage that Cuil claims it has over the other search engines, is that their results will be displayed and ordered based more on the content of the site than its quality and the links pointing to it. I also noticed that they took a different approach by giving it a fresh new visual layout. Cuil’s results layout is a big break from what you’re used to. You get a choice of a two- or three-column display with tabs for result filters across the top and a Category box on the right offering related topics. Results include not only more text than most current search engines provide—usually a full paragraph—but also related images. The layout is easier on the eyes than the results pages of the leading search engines, with a more book like appearance. One might find this a little annoying, but it is an advantage to sites that are shown with pictures over those without, regardless of the value of the page itself.

I had a look at Chris Nuttall’s article and he did note something I personally took interest in “ A lot of talk has centred around Cuil’s 120 billion-page search index, which it claims is three times larger than Google’s, as well as its technology that enables it to use just a handful of servers for queries, rather than the massed ranks of thousands used by Google. This technology seems to be Cuil’s key advantage”. And I do agree that it would have an easier job convincing other search engines to buy its cost-saving solution than persuading users to switch from Google, or to use Cuil as their main alternative. If Tom Costello, Anna Patterson, Russell Power and Louis Monier had sold this technology to Google they might be as rich as Brin and Page today. It makes me wonder why they couldn’t implement this at Google. Were they the only ones with this idea at the Google offices?

After a few tries on Cuil, I noticed the advantages, but maybe, like the rest of the world, I’m just not ready for change. I’m stuck in my old ways. It will take time for Cuil to get to Google’s level but the effort is worth it. Coming up with a new search engine despite knowing the challenges that lie ahead is an example we all ought to try and follow. The day is coming when any individual can come up with his or her own search engine, probably centred on personalised search, where we can find things that interest us and that are customised to users’ specifications. Until that day I’ll stand with Tom Costello and friends and remain cool.