At least what they say… : “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.”
Who are they? Just a bunch of people involved previously in searches and cluster computing at Google, IBM, ebay and some investors. Google is attacked in it’s own kingdom not by Microsoft or Yahoo but by a small company nobody knew about before.
How Cuil could be better than google? “They” say:
- 3 times more pages indexed that google. A simple search proofs the opposite: Google returns 3,220,000,000 results for blog while Cuil finds only 728,980,364. Other results:
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Search Terms Google Results Cuils Results blog 3,220,000,000 728,980,364 google 2,490,000,000 516,386,388 cuil 705,000 121,578 digg 665,000,000 19,160,646 - Contextual search: For example you search for Jaguar. Cuil will display several tabs from where you can select what kind of Jaguar you are looking: the animal, the car, the operating system, … etc. Contextual search is implemented by 2 widgets included in the search page: Tabs and Categories: along with the results cuil displays a list of categories and a set of tabs from where you can add additional filters to the results.
- Search Term Suggestion similar to what Google Suggest does.
- “Popularity is useful, but not always important” - Cuil says their philosophy is not to find the most popular searches but to determine the contexts related to what users are looking for. Simple searches will return the popular results, more complex searches will be context based searches.
- Cuil does not display only the results, but also information considered useful like images and small definitions.
- Privacy, one of the most important things: “Cuil analyzes the Web, not its users”. In their Privacy Policy it’s stated: “Privacy is a hot topic these days, and we want you to feel totally comfortable using our service, so our privacy policy is very simple: 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. “
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