Cuil

The news of a new search engine has been spreading like wild fire. cuil is started by some former google employees.

What's so special about this new search engine ? The index is huuuuuuge!!!!! Which means the web is much bigger than what google had told us. Hope this index does not contain redundant or unimportant information.

The viral marketing and the TV marketing of this new search engine www.cuil.com is in place, but as a fairly intensive search engine user I think there are two main arguable points :-

a) The philosophy of cuil.
b) The release time. (I think it is too early. They should have waited for some more time).

Philosophy :-
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"Rather than rely on superficial popularity metrics, Cuil searches for and ranks pages based on their content and relevance."

I would rather trust 100000 people saying that a website is relevant for my query rather than an algorithm which says this is the relevant website. Many search engine users might not know anything on what they are searching. They might be searching something because people are talking about it and they want a quick summary rather than an authoritative treatise on a subject.
Example :
a) I might have heard someone talking about blackberry censorship in India, and I just want to know why people are talking about it. Never underestimate popularity metrics.

b) If something is popular it is for a reason and more people would like to know/read about it. Only people who are interested in going deep have the motivation to go deeper searching for the "authoritative truth". Example : Compare the search of TCP/IP in google and cuil.

So it will be great if popularity metrics is also taken into account.

But one thing I would appreciate is a search engine which provides ALTERNATE RESULTS than many search engines.

That's something interesting.

Release Time :-
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Too early.The pressure of time and money is there, but this is a half done work.Where are the image searches, news etc. etc. or at least something NEW???

This looks more like an academic project rather than an industrial search engine.

They SHOULD put some kind of a spell checker feature. The last time I checked it, Kramer vs. Kramer , Kramer v/s Kramer , Kramer versus Kramer all give different results.

My remark : Lots to improve there is room for improvement.

But all the best to Cuil!!! We need a competitor to google!