Cuil is an old Irish word for knowledge. For knowledge, ask Cuil.

A new search engine which calls itself Cuil (pronounced cool) opened its virtual doors for business today.  Cuil claims to be the worlds largest search engine with more indexed pages than any other search engine product, including Google.

Rocky Debut

The debut did not go smoothly this morning however as the servers at Cuil found the task a bit overwhelming and the new search engine was forced to display an error page. 

I was ably to get onto to the site late this morning however.  My initial impression is that this is not a serious threat to Google.  It approached the return of results much differently and returns pages based upon relevance to the search, much like eBay's "Best Match". 

Be a good Speller

It seems the Cuil search engine has no method for handling spelling errors in search and it will not give the user  an alternative suggestion as Google does.  If your spelling is off, you will see no results.

I am also not quite sure where the results and the images displayed with the results are connected. From a search of my own name, many articles of mine were returned, with images of people I do not know.  Same goes for simple searches for my business names and other web properties.

The site may be overwhemed with traffic on its debut, so check back, the features page on the site seems to indicate more functionality than what I saw this morning. I am sure the Cuil (cool) "thing" will develop over time into a more useful interface.  But for now it is simply another place for people to find your web pages and blog articles... Hooray for us!

Welcome to Cuil—the world’s biggest search engine. The Internet has grown. We think it’s time search did too.
The Internet has grown exponentially in the last fifteen years but search engines have not kept up—until now. Cuil searches more pages on the Web than anyone else—three times as many as Google and ten times as many as Microsoft.

Rather than rely on superficial popularity metrics, Cuil searches for and ranks pages based on their content and relevance. When we find a page with your keywords, we stay on that page and analyze the rest of its content, its concepts, their inter-relationships and the page’s coherency.

Then we offer you helpful choices and suggestions until you find the page you want and that you know is out there. We believe that analyzing the Web rather than our users is a more useful approach, so we don’t collect data about you and your habits, lest we are tempted to peek. With Cuil, your search history is always private.

About Cuil

Cuil (pronounced COOL) is a search engine that combines the largest Web index with content-based relevance methods, organized results, and complete user privacy. The company’s next generation approach to search is the result of proprietary breakthroughs in search architecture and ranking algorithms. Cuil’s employees have extensive experience in search, having worked at Google, IBM, eBay, AltaVista, Stanford University, the Internet Archive and other technology companies and research centers. Cuil is located in Menlo Park, California and has received series A funding from Tugboat Ventures and Greylock Partners, and series B funding from Madrone Capital Partners. Cuil derives its name from an old Irish word for knowledge, reflecting the background of co-founder and CEO, Tom Costello, who hails from Drogheda, Ireland. For more information, please visit www.cuil.com.