Cold War: Where Cuil is Cool

“Did you Google the Olympics last night?” “Why don’t you just Google it?” “Go on! Google it?” … And so the story goes. If we are talking search engines, then Google is the big daddy of them all, usurping the likes of Yahoo! and its lesser known colleagues to stand tall on the dais collecting first place honours. But the question is – for how long?In 2006, search engine giant Google took offence to their trademark being used as a verb to describe surfing the ‘net. This was around the time that ‘Google’ achieved a ranking in the Oxford English Dictionary, and ‘to google’ found its way into the Webster Dictionary, America’s number one reference guide. With concerns about their trademark being abused, Google began googling for a lawyer.

Fast forward to 2008, and a great deal has happened since the lawsuits. A Cold War has begun, and Google has now come under fire from within, and the Google metropolis may just catch a cold as a result of the newest kid on the search engine block.

Having its embryonic awakening inside the walls of the Google giant, the new generation search engine Cuil (phonetically pronounced ‘cool’), has been founded by ex-Google engineers, and they are ready to deliver a first class search engine that rivals their former employer.

Cuil, is from a Gaelic word meaning ‘knowledge.’ The company is managed by the likes of Tom Costello and his wife, Anna Patterson; Anna was the architect of Google’s search index known as ‘TeraGoogle’. The pair and their team of engineers have positioned themselves with a unique selling position based on the meaning of ‘cuil’ – “For knowledge, ask Cuil.” This subtle distinction suggests that Cuil is not about getting kicks out of clicks on their search engine, but want to provide a strategic and authoritative indexing experience for its users.

So is Cuil cool enough to knock the socks off the biggest search engine of them all? The founders seem to think so, given that the indexing of the web under their servers is ‘producing far more relevant results’.

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How is it possible? Well Google tends to rely on caching results based on popularity – not a bad thing really, but Cuil claims that its search engines are based on the ‘organisation of ideas’ and with that comes a far more efficient means of delivery the ‘organised’ chaos that the web represents.

According to the company’s website they “founded Cuil to give users the opportunity to explore the Internet more fully and discover its true potential.” Certainly there’s no argument that the user interface packs a real punch with its crisp, fresh and inviting look, but is this enough to knock the stuffing out of their rivals?

Like a popularly elected new government, Cuil is likely to have a glowing first six months ‘spidering’ their way across the global village to entice people (yes, people – not ‘users’) to feed on their search engine offerings; in fact, they’ve already thrown down the gauntlet in this Cold War by offering to “rank pages based on content instead of the number of clicks.” ‘So What?’ I hear you say. Well, for good number of Australians who are understandably concerned about privacy on the web, it means a big change has arrived as a result of web searching habits.

Unlike its big brother rivals, Cuil will not collect the vast volumes of information about an individual’s web surfing habits. Although a great privacy feature for consumers, certainly marketers and online businesses will be pondering the options of Cuil compared to Google’s metropolis of online marketing offerings, including AdWords and AdSense.

Among its features, Cuil claims the status of being the ‘biggest internet search engine,’ having ‘indexed 120 billion web pages.’ Now given that Cuil focuses on search results according to page content, rather than popularity, then it certainly is a claim worthy of note. But what if you want to see the most popular pages? Does this mean it’s back to Google?

Together with the search engine’s tabbed features, and its ability to search by relevant results, the content-rich web experience will be embraced by those who like to kick mud in the face of Google (yes, you know who you are!), but only time will tell whether these ex-Google employees can truly rival the mother ship.

It will also mean highly qualified search engine optimisation (SEO) specialists will need to start looking at how websites can be more attractive to yet another search engine.

I LOVE CHROME & SO DOES JASON, FROM SIGNATURE VERVE