Former Google executives and web gurus have gotten together – along with 33 million dollars in venture capital – to launch a new rival to the Google search engine, Cuil (pronounced “cool”). Among it’s many boasts is that it contains three times the index, the total number of pages searched by the engine, as Google.
That might seem impressive at first, until you consider the fact that Google specifically banned a number of websites owing to the fact that they were either blackhat SEO honey pots or copyright infringers. Take for example this search for “dragonflyeye,” Safe Search on, Safe Search off. Neither yeilds the domain which bears the name. There is, however, a ClaimID account I haven’t used in three years, some spam blogs and a bunch of comments I’ve made at PHP.net. None of this is accurate to what one might expect to find when searching for my domain name.
So, they’ve got some room to grow. It would be nice to have another competitor in the search engine market that provides something a little different, but relevant keyword searching is relevant keyword searching, and Google seems to have it down. I do like the basic layout of Cuil and if they improve their back end, they might really have something. Time will tell.
3 replies on “Cuil Launches Today”
I tried to search for a G-rated television show on Cuil. This television show has its own web-site, and Cuil didn’t find it. What kind of search is that? Google find the site easily.
Mark me down as not impressed.
in the interest of charity, it may be that the servers are still in the process of indexing. But if they are, why are they bragging about what they have indexed?
It’s all very anti-climatic.
In the interest of charity … I don’t have anything good to say about Cuil, so I won’t say it.
But I do remember having an argument with my ex-wife (although she wasn’t “ex-” then), about restaurants along Ridge Road in Greece. There were sooooo many, most of them excellent, that if we went to a restaurant and got bad service or bad food, why go back? We’ve already found places we like, so I didn’t see any reason to give a poor restaurant a second chance. It would be like rewarding failure. Needless to say, the ex-wife didn’t agree with me.