Cuil (pronounced “cool”) is a new Internet search engine created by ex-Googlers Tom Costello and Anna Patterson. Cuil’s mission is to not invade your privacy on searches (the way Google does). But can a fresh look and the promise to protect the privacy of its users make Cuil a success?
Is Cuil a “Google Killer”? No way. After running a search for “methodshop” I was surprised to see a lot of see low traffic pages from our site in the results. Other searches for words like “ipod” and “iphone” aslo returned disappointing results. The Cuil interface presents results in 2 or 3 columns – a nice visual touch making it very easy to quickly scan a page of results. The layout may be pretty, but at the end of the day Cuil lacks the sophisticated backend software that makes Google so damn good.
So what does Cuil mean anyway? Cuil is the Gaelic word knowledge and hazel. There’s a famous Gaelic story about a salmon that ate nine hazelnuts that had fallen into the Fountain of Wisdom. As a result, the salmon gained all the knowledge in the world. Perhaps Tom Costello ate the salmon.
Massive traffic to the site earlier this week led to widespread “failure” messages, but try today at http://www.cuil.com/.
methodshop
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