Cuil: The World’s Biggest Search Engine

Cuil, pronounced Cool, is a brand new search engine created by ex-Google employees, and it claims that it is the biggest search engine in the world. It claims to index three times more web pages than Google does, and ten times more than Microsoft. It says that the internet is growing rapidly, but search engines aren’t keeping up.

At the time of this blog post’s development, the amount of web pages that Cuil searches is 121,617,892,992. It claims that it searches the web a lot faster than many other search engines. Although Cuil claim to be the biggest, Google created a blog post insisting that it currently has the largest index, and that they recently had found over one trillion web pages. They, however, said:  “We don’t index every one of those trillion pages — many of them are similar to each other, or represent auto-generated content similar to the calendar example that isn’t very useful to searchers. But we’re proud to have the most comprehensive index of any search engine, and our goal always has been to index all the world’s data.”

As far as I can see, Cuil seems to be similar to Ask.com, and provides a more interactive and high-tech experince than Google does. It certainly provides detailed information about the web page, and it is not set out the same way that Google is. It is set in squares of information with many different pages for the results, usually contains a logo or picture related to that web page with the search, obviously the link and name. You can select to have two or three columns of information, and their is a feature in which you can select a catogery related to your search. For instance if we type in “Chris Pirillo”, we have Lockergnome, Chris’ Blog and Live Stream Page, the uStream page  and popular posts on the first page. The catogeries on the right list: Tech TV, G4 Hosts and Stsff, Podcasters, American Bloggers, Programmers and Journalists.

This site also has SafeSearch and typing suggestions. It is simple yet detailed, and it looks like a very jazzy alternative to Google. However, it doesn’t seem to have any other features (yet), such as an image search tool, maps and other useful services which Google does. The homepage, while stylish and modern, may be difficult to read for some people, and the text is quite small. The site claims to have indexed over 120 billion pages and Twiceler is the web crawler that it uses.

All in all, this is a pretty good search engine, with great potential. It unfortunately does not have features Google offers yet, but it may in the future, and I believe an eye should be kept on this service. Considering, however, that Yahoo! and other huge search engines are having problems catching up with Google, what will be the chances of Cuil really taking of the ground. At least they must have the knowledge of good searching because of their experinces with Google. It’s a beautiful site with great styles and fonts, but it may be difficult to read for some people. Cuil is an old Irish word for knowledge, but it’s going to take some time to get people to understand it’s pronounced Cuil. The management consists of only seven people, and they are hiring. The founder and CEO Tom Costello. You can easily submit your site, but I am somewhat worried about how people would like viewing the results as they are dispalyed on Cuil.

Visit Cuil at www.cuil.com. Tell us what you think when you have done, by leaving a comment! We are always interested in what you have to say.