Cuil: Google’s latest challenger
A new search engine devised by a group of former Google employees is the latest pretender to the Mountain View company’s search dominance.
Cuil.com (pronounced cool) claims to be the “world’s biggest search engine”, indexing 121 billion pages - reputedly 3 times as many as Google.
“Our significant breakthroughs in search technology have enabled us to index much more of the internet - placing nearly the entire web at the fingertips of every user.” said Cuil co-founder Tom Costello.
In addition to taking the fight to Google in terms of index size, Cuil also highlight improved privacy as a key USP, stating it does not collect any identifiable personal information - such as search history or cookies - of any kind.
However, it could take more than this to make any significant inroads into Google’s market share, as Danny Sullivan of Search Engine Land points out. Although some privacy concerns have been raised over the record keeping of the leading search engines, it hasn’t put people off using them.
3 column display
In a break from Google’s now familiar 1-10 SERP listings (give or take a few OneBox results thrown in here and there), Cuil offers users either a 2 or 3 column results display (as below) - though by their own admission the unusual layout creates uncertainty over which is the most relevant result.
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Relevant results
Cuil is also claiming to have the edge over Google when it comes to the all important relevancy of its results, focusing more on content analysis than the link popularity its main rivals rely on.
Where it does rely on inbound links when ranking pages, it claims to do so more intelligently; using a system called ‘IdeaRank’ - which boils down to looking at links coming from related sites, as Danny Sullivan explains.
Cuil has initally been developed for American English, with support for major European languages coming later this year.
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