A new search engine to compete with Google, Yahoo and others was announced a few days ago.
It's called Cuil, which is the Gaelic word for knowledge (and hazel) and is pronounced 'cool'. It has been developed by some people who used to work for Google.
The developers of Cuil claim to have several gotchas over current search engines (SEs):
It doesn't collect personal data. This is in sharp contrast to current SEs which log the IP address and other information on each search that can be used to identify the user and what they searched for. The information is just not there to be handed over to the 'authorities' and so abuse is impossible.
It doesn't rate popularity so highly. Google and other SEs base the relevance of their results on how 'popular' web pages are. This has been and is being widely exploited by vested interests to artificially promote pages in search results.
It indexes a lot of pages. 120 billion is a lot. It's important to index as many pages as possible to be able to find the needles of real information in the haystacks of the world wide web.
Perhaps the most significant and welcome development is the use of 'idea' and context to represent relevance. Cuil analyzes the content of each page on the web to extract the 'ideas' that it contains and matches these to the 'ideas' in a search query. We searched for the word «painting» and it seemed to realise that there were lots of different types of painting: oil-, face-, body-, house-, and other useful pointers like 'art genres'. Presenting the alternative ideas should allow a user to refine their search and cone in on their real target although how easy this might be remains to be seen.
A whole industry has sprung up around promoting websites by various backdoor means to 'game' the search engines. The result is substantial number of web pages which contain no useful information but which show up as relevant in results. Adsense pages are a typical example. It would be a vast benefit to the user community if the search engine was blind to these tactics and Cuil shows some promise here.
Is this the David to take on Googliath? The power and money behind big G is a force to be reckoned with and Cuil doesn't show adverts (yet). The Impressionist has always liked Google, especially its «don't be evil» philosophy. But its technical success has made it into a private monopoly, albeit largely benign at the moment. Other SEs are essentially just more of the same, trying to ape Google's success with its PageRank based system. The area of internet search desperately needs innovative thought and competition and Cuil will at least make the engineers at Google sit up and think harder.
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