A Cuil reaction to new search engine

A new search engine launched yesterday. Cuil (that's "cool", phonetically) is today's buzz word on the web, primarily because the Cuil's founders - Tom Costello, Anna Patterson, Louis Monier and Russell Power - are respected search experts. Patterson, Monier and Power are former Google employees, and comparisons with the 300lb gorilla of internet search abound.

Michael Arrington at TechCrunch compares sizes. At launch, Cuil boasted an index of 120 billion webpages. Cuil claims this makes it larger than Google, although Google begs to differ.

"Even if Cuil is bigger than Google, it doesn't mean Cuil is more relevant," points out Danny Sullivan on Search Engine Land. "Nor does it mean adding more documents in a "I'm bigger than you" game would improve the state of search overall."

Indexing is only part of the problem, says Om Malik at Gigaom. "Analysing and displaying all the information is extremely resource-intensive." Cuil claims to rank pages by content rather than the popularity rank. But this isn't a black and white issue, says Sullivan.

Google relies on more than just popularity to rank pages, and preliminary results suggest Cuil actually does use popularity to rank some sites - else a search for Harry Potter wouldn't bring up the official movie site at the top of the list.

That leaves a rather nice 'magazine style' results layout as one of Cuil's USPs - something that's likely to be loved or hated depending on the user.

But Cuil's real selling point might prove to be the privacy issue. It claims not to log IP information - something that Google, Yahoo and Teoma (the engine behind Ask) all do.

"That may be reassuring to some searchers, but to date, even scare stories about what Google could do (not that it does) hasn't kept searchers away from it," says Sullivan.

Cuil is no more than 24 hours old - Google has been with us for a decade. Clearly, it's too early to say whether the king of search is about to be usurped.

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