I was terrorized when i read this today morning, Could this be really true.
In a market where Microsoft is facing difficulty in competing with Google, a new entrant to the Internet search scene has unveiled itself, it is Cuil (www.cuil.com)
Cuil was founded in 2005, and funded with $33 million dollars by 3 different venture capitalist firms, and opened to the public today the 28th of July 2008.
Cuil the latest internet search engine was engineered by ex googlers, and claims it can index pages cheaper and faster than google. Cuil claims it already indexes 121,617,892,992 web pages
Cuil has a very simple design similar but different than google in its more sophisticated simple business appealing look. All search results are displayed accompanied by a picture. You can choose whether you want your results to appear in 2 or 3 column format, and there is a preferences section where you can turn on the safe search and the typing suggestions options
Cuil will eventually serve ads, but they have launched the site with no ads for now.
They also offer tab suggestions (topics related to your search) and a Categories section with even more suggestions.
Cuil seems to have already have an agreement with Mozilla, as they have a link to add Cuil to Firefox browser, and it doesn’t show this in Internet Explorer.
Cuil believes that:
Size matters because many people use the Internet to find information that is of interest to them, even if it’s not popular. Existing technology can’t keep up with the increasing volume of Web pages. If a search engine is incapable of indexing the Internet properly how can it hope to provide accurate search results? Imagine if the phone company decided to stop listing infrequently called numbers in the phone book. Maybe no one phones your grandmother much, but if her friend from the old neighborhood wants to get in touch, shouldn’t her number be in the book? Cuil lists all the numbers, even the ones that aren’t called much. Because one day someone will need that number.
Popularity is useful, but has dominated search results so heavily that it gets harder and harder to find the page you 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 your question. But for a deeper search, establishing relevancy is more than a numbers game. Cuil prefers to find all the pages with your keyword or phrase and then analyze the rest of the content on those pages. During this analysis we discover that your keywords have different meanings in different contexts. Once we’ve established the context of the pages, we’re in a much better position to help you in your search.
The Internet is information; usually too much. Ten blue links is a simple concept which fails to reflect the huge diversity and variety of information available to you on the Web. Cuil organizes the Internet so you can find the information you want. We separate different ideas from each other so you can choose the one that interests you. We pick images to illustrate the idea behind each page to aid you in your choice. We include roll-over definitions and offer you ideas to refine your search. We can do all this because we believe that information is only useful when it’s sorted. Cuil’s goal is to guide you towards answers to the questions you’re not even sure how to ask.
Privacy is a hot topic these days, and we want you to feel totally comfortable using our service. Because Cuil analyzes Web pages and not click-throughs, we don’t need to know your search history and habits. So our privacy policy is very simple: when you search with Cuil, we do not collect any personally identifiable information, period. We have no idea who sends queries: not by name, not by IP address, and not by cookie. Your search history is your business, not ours. We don’t need to keep logs of our users’ search activity, so we don’t. For further details, read our Privacy Policy. Don’t worry, it’s short and to the point. No legal mumbo-jumbo.
As for Google, they announced on their official blog the following on the 25th of July
“We’ve known it for a long time: the web is big. The first Google index in 1998 already had 26 million pages, and by 2000 the Google index reached the one billion mark. Over the last eight years, we’ve seen a lot of big numbers about how much content is really out there. Recently, even our search engineers stopped in awe about just big the web is these days — when our systems that process links on the web to find new content hit a milestone: 1 trillion (as in 1,000,000,000,000) unique URLs on the web at once!”
Was the date for this announcement a coincidence or was is a direct hit to the upcoming search portal.
Only time will prove who will be the better search engine?