Cuil, pronounced Cool, is a new search engine, one that’s thought to be able to take on Google. Quite an ambition.
Who’s Cuil?
Cuil has been hidden away, getting their technology sorted and, as of this morning, they’ve decided to open their searches up for public browsing.
All 120 billion Web pages of it.
There’s a few things that you need to know about Cuil.
It was formed by four people, amount them Anna Patterson, who sold her Web search company to Google back in 2004, giving them the base for the power that they now have.
Two of the other founders were also ex-Google engineers.
Lots of pages
OK, we know it has 120 billion pages in it’s index, but how does Cuil’s index size compare with Google?
Google don’t officially say how many pages they have, but Patterson is quoted as saying that it’s three times as much as Google.
Probably not by coincidence, Google added a post to their blog on Friday saying that they scan over a trillion URLs – not index them, but scan.
Google – much more than Search
Of course Google isn’t just a search engine company now — it’s highly arguable that they’ve always been an advertising company that happened to have a search engine — Google is now an application company, see Gmail, Google Docs, etc.
We wish the best of luck to Cuil and will certainly be using them for a while to see if Google’s search results can be matched.
Tried Cuil for resort town “boothbay harbor maine” and it returned a lot of junk promotional pages for telephone service and dish.
Same search on Google gives 1st map and second chamber link.
Cuil is a waste of time
Tried Cuil – very slow…no slower than that….I’m not going to wait slow.
Then every three column panel had repeats – out of 1268 results, the first five pages…slow pages, remember… had mostly repeats from the first page.
No way to get continuous list of hits. Nothing shows up until the search is complete – why not show the first page while finishing the search?
Photos are not relevant to articles and waste bandwidth.
Did I mention how slow it was…
Many searches return “no results found” the first time, then find results on second search. Even clicking on info/aboutus/FAQ would first show page not found, and then if you click a second time, the page will appear.
We used it on early (UK time) yesterday and the performance was reasonable.
We figured that they would have had a hard day yesterday as _everyone_ hit them for try out the service.
10 minutes to load Cuil’s home page… Um.. so if they search billions of web pages, it must be using all it’s bandwidth for that, since they have none for me….
I took a dump and made coffee while Cuil’s home page loaded. It finally did. I tried to search something (diatoms) and it said that it found several thousand matches, as expected… but never displayed any! WTF, I mean is this a joke? Glad I’m not one of the venture capitalists that poured millions into this one..