Internet Marketing Blog

Former Google Employees unveil Cuil, a new search engine

July 29, 2008 – 5:31 pm

Updated - Please see link at bottom of page to Ben Gomes article.

Cuil.com a new search engine, was recently released and with their release came a lot of publicity. Billed as a Google competitor, developed by former employees from Google, the expectations are high. A new search engine faces many technical challenges including perceptions and pessimism. Just ask the hundreds of Google competitors that came before Cuil. The path Cuil will travel will be challenging.

So how does a new tool work it’s way into our toolbox? Either it helps us perform a new task or improves our ability to do a current task. If either of these two goals are met, it gets in. Staying in the toolbox is a different story.

Cuil does have several useful features and a great privacy policy that reads in part,

…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 cookies (more on this later). Your search history is your business, not ours.

Cuil also claims to be the search engines with the largest index, more pages and better organization. Are users ready for even more features? Mahalo thinks so.

Mahalo.com for example, provides tabs of the same search results on the same page including, Google, Yahoo, Live Search, Ask, Wikipedia, Del.icio.us, YouTube and Flickr. This makes it easy to research any given topic in multiple sources. This feature is earning Mahalo a spot in my own toolbox. Cuil offers buttons across the top to suggest additional searches. The results on Cuil are interesting if only a wee bit unexpected at times.

They may have an uphill climb competing against the perceptions of millions of Google users. But then again, they only really have to compete enough to be bought. Maybe whatever they’re running under the hood is worth millions? Otherwise it seems they might have been better off releasing with some sort of an ad model that advertisers and publishers could potentially adopt.

Additional Readings:

Former Googleers unveil Cuil, a new search engine

Ex-Google engineers debut ‘Cuil’ way to search

Why Cuil is No Threat to Google

Search quality, continued by Ben Gomes