New Cuil Search Engine

We have heard of the Wikia search engine, a new open-source-concept, wiki-styled search engine that’s created by Jimmy Wales, the Wikipedia founder. It allows users to edit the search and add to it too – all so very community-based, and very Wiki-inspired!

Now, there’s a new search engine Cuil (pronounced cool) that claims to be the biggest search engine on the web, searching 121, 617 892 992 web pages, as of today. That’s more than 120 billion web pages!

It’s been developed by the Menlo Park start-up, with Anna Patterson, as president and co-founder of Cuil. According to the LA Times article, she’s “an ex-Googler, the architect of the Web giant’s TeraGoogle search index that launched in 2006”.

Acoording to Ms Patterson, “Cuil …has come up with a search engine that indexes 120 billion Web pages, ranks results by relevance instead of popularity, organizes the results by ideas and protects the privacy of its users”.

When I did a self-conscious, almost meta-like search of the word “Cuil”, I got some interesting searches. The main Cuil site mentions that “Cuil searches more pages on the Web than anyone else three times as many as Google and ten times as many as Microsoft”. It goes on to say:

Rather than rely on superficial popularity metrics, Cuil searches for and ranks pages based on their content and relevance. When we find a page with your keywords, we stay on that page and analyze the rest of its content, its concepts, their inter-relationships and the page’s coherency.

Then we offer you helpful choices and suggestions until you find the page you want and that you know is out there. We believe that analyzing the Web rather than our users is a more useful approach, so we don’t collect data about you and your habits, lest we are tempted to peek. With Cuil, your search history is always private.

Cuil is an old Irish word for knowledge. For knowledge, ask Cuil.

The Cuil philosophy is also available on the site.

I did another quick self-conscious search on Blogscapes and it provided a user-friendly table, also seen as ‘magazine’ format return of searches with links to the various sites, and all Blogscapes’ entries are listed!

Cool! Oh , I mean Cuil!