Cuil is an ancient Irish word that means “knowledge.” More than that, it’s the latest revolutionary search engine to arrive on the vast shores of the internet. What makes it so different from other search engines is that it sorts out your search results, making it easier for the user to select websites with more relevant content, therefore making the entire research process faster and more efficient.
The founders of Cuil have been long-time users of various search engines and the internet. Each of them have specialized focuses, which when brought together combines to make Cuil the most revolutionary yet efficient search engine around. Cuil’s founders and board is made up of: Tom Costello, Anna Patterson, Russell Power, Louis Monier, Vince Sollitto, Pete Pzymanski, and Bruce Baumgart. Each of them have had significant experience in working with some of the Internet’s largest search engines, recognizing problems and providing solutions, making Cuil distinguished from other search engines today. The founders and staff have worked at IBM, Stanford, Alta Vista, Google, and other high-ranking research and internet facilities.
The basic philosophy of Cuil works with two main concepts: it helps with the problems of indexing the whole internet, and analyzing its results for achieving results that are more relevant. Those two concepts are evident in the way Cuil works and in its design. As the world’s largest index, users have a much easier time in finding the information they need.
Its features include: drilldowns, roll-over definitions, tabs, and navigation suggestions. Drilldowns are the categories neatly placed on the right side of the search results page, where you can see the words Explore by Category. Hovering your mouse over any category will show you related categories to help you refine your search. Roll-over definitions provide more information on a category and is extremely useful in reducing the time used up for finding what you need. The tabs function provides suggestions related to the search term you entered. Lastly, the navigation suggestion provides links and an icon for the website, allowing users to know more about the websites before they click on it.
On its first day, Cuil had over 50 million searchers, and its management admits that it was overwhelming and caused some machines to fail, and the founders also discovered many bugs. The founders didn’t expect this kind of attention and traffic, but many believe that the internet revolution that is Cuil, has only just begun and will grow to be one of the biggest and best search engines out there, competing with Google and Yahoo.
Cuil’s functions and overall design is quite intuitive, although many feel that it takes some time to get used to. An interesting aspect of Cuil as well is that it provides different results that other search engines. However, the massive index it boasts of makes searching extremely efficient, with a nice and neat interface too.
Cuil is definitely going for it, but it’s hard to imagine them doing anything but incremental changes to what Google’s done. And even that would take years of effort.
Me.dium.com has taken a different tack. We have a full web index, but we change the results based on the surfing activity of our user base (now over 2,000,000). It’s in alpha, but I’d be curious to hear your thoughts. http://me.dium.com/search
Comment by Chris — August 4, 2008 @ 12:41 pm