Posted on Monday, July 28 2008 @ 23:54 CEST by Thomas De Maesschalck
Normally I wouldn't cover the launch of a new search engine but this time it's a special one:
Cuil is a search engine created by ex-Google employees. Cuil uses a
different approach than Google, while the search engine king got big by putting an emphasis on inbound links Cuil focus more on your content and will attempt to figure out how relevant it is.
Instead of just looking at the number and quality of links to and from a webpage as Google's technology does, Cuil attempts to understand more about the information on a page and the terms people use to search. Results are displayed in a magazine format rather than a list.
The company is also trying to set itself apart from Google by not retaining any information about what people search for.
Cuil founders, Anna Patterson, Russell Power and Louis Monier are former Google staffers. The other founder Tom Patterson worked for IBM and others on search and storage technologies.
By declaring its aim of taking on Google, Cuil joins a long list of others that have tried and largely failed to dent the search giant's market share. Other contenders include Teoma, Vivisimo, Snap, Mahalo and Powerset.
One word of advice for Cuil: if you want to beat Google you'll have to invest more in servers. Before I wrote this article I did a couple of random searches and sometimes Cuil responded with the following error message:
No results because of high load...
Due to excessive load, our servers didn't return results. Please try your search again.
