Saturday, August 2, 2008

Cuil - Is there finally a worthy challenger to Google's supremacy in the Search space

www.cuil.com - started by a bunch of ex-Googlers is a new search engine that claims to have the world's largest index. For those who are amused by the name, it apparently means "knowledge" in Irish. Even for a hardcore Googler like me, Cuil does offer a number of interesting features.

When you type the words on the Search edit box, cuil throws up a list of similar sounding words from its database ( and not from Autocomplete of IE), thereby helping you to limit the amount of typing that needs to happen through an intelligent choice mechanism
The Search also throws up results in an interesting organized way as opposed to Google's rather cluttered form. Look at what a search on "Dermatology" showed up.

It has been rumored that the Cuil team has received over $30 million in funding to improvise on its endeavors. Though it is still early days to determine if it is going to be worthy competitor to Google, it is really exciting for power users like me to have more choices. Also remember that Google has been quite faithful to its original Search User Interface and has kept things rather simple. Maybe it is time to see if it needs to bring more sophistication to the interface.

P.S. Please be extremely careful while typing the name of the Cuil URL. A mix of words would lead to http://www.culi.com/ which is an Italian hard-core porn site. I am sure that one would not want to put one's job at jeopardy if your organization's firewall catches you unawares while trying to attempt an innocuous search.

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