Cuil ready for the Google Kill.

Everyone knows about Google, it is synonymous to search, and to Internet for many. Every week we techies hear about new ventures and acquisitions by Google, and the horizon is ever increasing. But, a husband-wife team from Stanford is trying to dent the giant’s domination, and that too aiming at the bull’s eye. Searching, which is the heart of Google's business.
Cuil is the new search engine which was unveiled earlier today (28th july), and unlike many other failed attempts by smaller and bigger companies to take down Google, Cuil looks fresh, genuine and original.
Cuil, (pronounced as cool), is fundamentally different from Google, be it the way it indexes results, shows results or navigates. Which is better is another question, that only time would answer. Initially when we hit the Cuil home page, you have a calm feeling with a black page and a very prominent search bar inviting you. But, as soon as you start typing you know Cuil is indeed very different. You get a drop down will autofill suggestions as you type a search string.
The Results page is the most innovative part, its built up into 3 parts, the bottom bar which has the Google like search page numbers, the top bar having the search box and category tabs (another innovation which we will explore more) and the content area, which unlike other search engines, shows the results in multiple columns, with images added wherever relevant. It gives the immediate feel of the each result. Also it has tabbed suggestion boxes,showing you related terms. All done in a neat Web 2.0 model, with limited loading time.
The key word for Cuil is categorizing, in the top bar, it shows various categories for results. when I searched for “Michael”, I got many tabbed categories like Michael Jackson, Michael Jordan, George Michael, More..., helping me to close in onto what I am looking for. The results, by default show the All results tab, with entries from all categories. Along with the results we have a box of tabs called “Explore by category” which further categorizes the content. It is more easy and fun searching in Cuil rather than Google’s all in a bucket way of searching.
Cuil's About page says it indexes over 140 Million pages (Google’s index comes to around 40 million) and they are the world’s biggest search engine. And, they do not use the Google’s page rank kind of indexing, where popularity (in terms of clicks and links) is the earning points. Instead, Cuil goes by content of each page and categorizes it. But, how far this fetches us realistic results is a question in hand. For example searching “Codevalley” returned one of the popular articles from my site, indexed by some other RSS site, and my profile from various blog directories. But, it did not show the website www.thecodevalley.com in the top five search pages. Also the image shown along with the search results were sometimes totally unrelated to the actual result. Also, the search engine refused to show any results at all many times, even though second try yielded thousands of results for the same query. Still, the most severe drawback with Cuil is that there is no image search, or any other type of search for that mattter, other than the normal search.
The conclusion is that Cuil beats Google by a very big margin in terms of Presentation of the results, but the actual searching technique of Cuil is to be tested. But, Cuil is worth trying, as it makes searching more interesting and interactive.
Start Cuiling here
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