Anna Patterson, a former Google employee, along with husband Tom Costello and a few other Google alum, has launched a new search engine, cuil.com.
Cuil, pronounced “cool,” is the latest of many start up search engines that have ambitions of taking on the big boys. Some analysts say Cuil has potential because of the pedigree of it’s founders.
“This is the most promising thing I’ve seen in a while,” said Danny Sullivan, who has followed the online search business for more than a decade and is the editor of Search Engine Land. “Whether they are going to threaten Microsoft, much less Google, that’s another story.”
Cuil has a slick look, with results displayed in several columns across the page, along with photos and longer entries than Google’s short snippets of text.
Costello, a former researcher at Stanford, claims that with 120 billion web pages Cuil’s search index is larger than any other. Although Google no longer reveals the size of it’s search index, estimates put it at 30 billion to 50 billion pages. However, index size isn’t everything. Relevancy is the key.
I realize cuil.com just launched today, but in my own test for relevancy I found the new search engine sorely lacking. Granted, I only did a few quick queries to see how Cuil measured up in terms of searches relevant to my site and entertainment in general, however, I would expect an exact search for a website should at least bring in results, and in most of my queries, there were none.
At this point in the game, I won’t be rushing out to buy any Cuil stock.