Google may still be the king when it comes to search, but it doesn’t mean that it will stay there forever. Cuil (pronounced “cool’) is the latest rival search engine that is looking to conquer the search arena.
According to the BBC article, it is the brainchild of ex-Googlers and at over 120 billion pages, claims to have a bigger webpage index than Google itself (a claim that is doubtful). But besides this claim and having people from Google’s staff on board, I don’t see it as much of a threat to the incumbent.
Other than the slick interface and the 4-letter name, so far the results are less than impressive. Some of my sites, that appear at the top on Google for certain keywords, didn’t even make it to the first few pages of Cuil for the same searches. In addition, multiple matches from the same domain show up together, forcing you to go through the other pages to find the relevant results.
It is too early to dismiss it completely and Google does appear to be stumbling in a few places. However, Google is still a giant that can easily outlast such threats. It’ll take something radically different to truly pose a challenge to it.
2 thoughts on “The latest Google rival is Cuil”
Interesting. Unfortunately I have a strong suspicion
that Google has entered the domain of “good enough”, a land where your size is more important then anything else.
I think the only place where perhaps some interesting engines might come-up is in dedicated vertical markets. Shopping, porn, etc.
Hmmm… Porn search engine… I should build one!
V.
Hurray for Porn search engine! Victor just hola’ if you need a PERL developer
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