A new search engine that is poised to offer a serious competition to search engine giant Google has been unveiled today. It is called Cuil (pronounced [ku?l], “cool”). It was founded by some former Google employees including a married couple: Anna Patterson and Tom Patterson. Other members of the founding team are: Russell Power and Louis Monier.
I tried Cuil a couple of hours ago and have the following impression of it. Cuil is different from Google in several ways:
You cannot help noticing the plain black interface that stares in your face when you logon to the website: www.curl.com In the middle of the black page is a simple Cuil logo. This stands out from the usual white pages offered by Google, Ask and Yahoo.
Aside the background colour, Cuil displays its results in a magazine-like block manner instead of the usual title-description-url listing offered by most other search engines. What’s more, there is an image thumbnail beside most of the search results, illustrating the search results even further. The glitch here though is that the thumbnails used are not always very relevant to the search result they are supposed to be illustrating. This is understandable since no computer algorithm can match human decision making processes.
One might say that the interface is inconsequential where real performance is the core matter. Cuil seems to perform too, albeit not as effectively as Google – in my candid opinion. I tried several searches and the results were not as relevant as that of Google though I will admit that the “Explore by Category” option that appears beside some search results is very cool. It offers some relevant terms to further drill-down the search results.
In addition, Cuil offers “Safe Search” and “Typing Suggestions”. These are not new anyway, as Google offers similar features.
As I type this, the website is under serious pressure due to the unprecedented traffic they have received which is a result of the huge media blitz around some “ex-Google employees setting-up an alternative to Google”.
As to whether Cuil would offer any serious challenge to Google and ultimately unsit the search engine goliath, time will tell.
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