« Are Meta tags important or relevant? | Home | Removing Google’s Duplicate Results Filter »
Cuil – First takes
By greyholme | July 28, 2008
The blogosphere today is alive with news of the latest “Google Killer” search engine, Cuil. Cuil, which is from the Gaelic for knowledge and also hazel, is a new search engine developed from former Google employees. So does it pose a threat to Google? According to Cuil’s press release the search engine provides the following features:
- Biggest Internet search engine—Cuil has indexed 120 billion Web pages, 3x more than any other search engine
- Organized results—Cuil’s magazine-style layout separates results by subject and allows further search by concept or category
- Different results—Unlike other search engines, Cuil ranks results by the content on each page, not its popularity
- Complete privacy protection—Cuil does not keep any personally identifiable information on users or their search histories
Regarding their first point Google no longer releases the number of pages in their index, however today in response announced their index follows over 1 trillion links. Also, maybe I am slightly biased, but none of my pages currently appear in the Cuil results so I know they are missing a few 
I do like how the results are displayed and am very interested to see what tools will be made to webmasters, if any, to customize how their results are displayed.
Cuil claims their search results will contain more relevant results due to an intensive content analysis. Translation – Cuil will not value “popularity factors” which potential means it will ignore the value of inbound links, traffic, and other off-page factors. This could be very interesting since their results should appear dramatically different the Google which is still based off the Hilltop principles.
The final point I find to be the most interesting. Cuil’s privacy policy states: “when you search with Cuil, we do not collect any personally identifiable information, period. We have no idea who sends queries: not by name, not by IP address, and not by cookies (more on this later). Your search history is your business, not ours.”
Compare that to Google’s privacy policy or perhaps most interestingly the list of data Google *admits* it collects from users including: Query, IP address, Language, Clicks to name a few. For a complete list read the very informative article about the Google’s data collection from the good people at SEOmoz.
Then again will respecting people’s privacy be enough to convert users to make Cuil a real threat to Google’s superiority? Time will provide the answer but my first take is not likely.
Update: At this time receiving:
No results because of high load…
Due to excessive load, our servers didn’t return results. Please try your search again.
probably isn’t going to help the Cuil cause.
Topics: Cuil, Google | No Comments »