Will Cuil dent Google’s might?

Cuil aka cool is the latest search engine that is gone compete with the mighty Google. Yeh, I know what you guys are thinking. Same here. There are tones of startups that claim to dethrone Google’s No 1 position in search engine. Nevertheless the surprising thing about cuil is their media coverage. I have to admit they really pulled it off well with the media. New York Times Article calls it “More Comprehensive” than Google. One of the reasons why the media loves cuil is because some of the folks that started them are ex-Googler.

Did we not see giants like yahoo and Microsoft try the same thing with their search engines that had little impact on googles search engine. What makes more interesting here is that Google had come up with some news before even cuil made them.

Here are some tidbits from Google's last Friday post

We've known it for a long time: the web is big. The first Google index in 1998 already had 26 million pages, and by 2000 the Google index reached the one billion mark. Over the last eight years, we've seen a lot of big numbers about how much content is really out there. Recently, even our search engineers stopped in awe about just how big the web is these days -- when our systems that process links on the web to find new content hit a milestone: 1 trillion (as in 1,000,000,000,000) unique URLs on the web at once!

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.

So out of curiosity started playing around the cuil, was disappointed to get a message saying (something different this time... No fail whale)














Apart from the no result due to excessive load, Webware complains that they saw the results to be either wrong or irrelevant. I think it’s too early to write off cuil. This is one of the startups to watch for. Maybe if they get things right, Microsoft may even consider them instead of yahoo.