33 Million Cool Dollars to Compete with Google

33 Million Cool Dollars to Compete with Google

A New Search Engine

New search engine CUIL (pronounced “cool”) was launched on Monday, July 28. Priced at a hefty thirty three million dollars, CUIL was created by former Google and AltaVista engineers to compete with Google. However, is it really going to make people switch from Google?

How Is It Different?

CUIL engineers are emphasizing the following:

• World’s largest search engine – indexed 120 billion web pages, three times larger than the size of Google’s index.
• World’s fastest search engine.
• Does not invade privacy. Unlike Google, users search histories are not logged.
• Does not use any Algorithm or ranking (read my recent article How Google Determines the Order of Search Results ) system like Google. Search results are instead based on website contents.

My Own Experiences

CUIL shows search results in 2 or 3 column formats which I find visually appealing. However, it’s somewhat impractical as it takes longer to find what you are looking for. Also, the results are filled with irrelevant information. For example, a “Canada personal finance websites” search brings results such as online casinos, Association of Research Libraries, fool.com, Internal Revenue Service, etc. Not a single Canadian site to be found.

What’s My Take?

It is good to see competition; however, I am not convinced enough to switch from Google. It took a long time for Google to become a number one global brand and it would be unrealistic to think CUIL can crush Google overnight, or maybe even in decades. I will stick to my Google and check in on CUIL every once in a while to see how they are doing.