Future GOOGLE???

"No way, can this be true?" - my first reaction. Of course, a new search engine has been given birth to, but is it gonna pose a threat to the well established players -- all of whom have quality search products but still haven't dented Google.

So what makes Cuil more worthy?


"Cuil" (the Gaelic word for "wisdom") is "Cool" in their claims of better index, search and interface, moreover, their privacy policy [.... our privacy policy is very simple: when you search with Cuil, we do not collect any personally identifiable information, period. We have no idea who sends queries: not by name, not by IP address, and not by cookies (more on this later). Your search history is your business, not ours] -- hmm..quite interesting.

Launched On: July 27th, 2008

Founders:
Tom Costello - IBM's WebFountain project
Anna Patterson - Google's TeraGoogle project (Google's massive search index)
Russell Power - TeraGoogle
Louis Monier - AltaVista founder, who later went to eBay and then Google

Hmm..so indeed, these people know what "Search" is.

Cuil claims to have indexed over 120 billion pages (3 times that of Google) and says it can maintain the search engine with less than one-tenth of the cost of Google. It says it can relate words easily using fewer servers than the giant search leader. It also is said to produce more relevant search results, since it revolves around organization of ideas rather than link popularity. The result presentation as a three-column matrix and the optional categorization is also appealing. But, verticals like, news search, image search, video search, local search, or map search are not provided by Cuil. Thankfully, no ads in results, yet.

Statistics:
Cuil utlizes two data centers, with 1,000 machines each running 8 CPUs.
Another 280 machines split between data centers are used to serve results.

Oops..it lost its second"L" (Cuill)...it was explained that people found it easier to remember the name with one L rather than two!!!

To conclude..I feel Google was launched at a time when all the search engines had abandoned improving search. Moreover, search is a billion dollar industry today. If a serious threat emerges, the policy would be an acquisition or partnership or developing your own equivalent rival. Anyhow, after a huge dominance by one, it's nice to see a new competitor in this arena.