A new search engine cuil [pronounced "cool"] was launched today, 28 Jul 2008. Anna Patterson and her husband Tom Castello partnered with Russell Power. They started with venture captical of $33M, and $5M of their own cash according to Crunchbase. Their goal is a new search engine that produces results with less expense or overhead, and better searching relevance than Google. I am always impressed by new technology, so I gave cuil a spin. I tried the following search terms:
- Tokyo [Results: hmmm...not sure this is what I was looking for...]
- Japan [Results: A little better, but not by much]
- Learning Japanese [Results: Good results. Easy to parse the sites.]
- Karate [Results: Great spectrum of results...But the image next to the World Karate Federation didn't match...it said TaeKwonDo]
- cuil [Results: oddly, the search for cuil fails to turn up the search engine itself...hmmm]
- google [Results: This was the best result thus far...love the 3 column layout with photos. Looks like a magazine article]
- who grows the best oranges? [Results: Interesting List of hits...."oranges are not the only fruit?"]
- review of madden football 08 vs ncaa football 09 -[Results: We didn’t find any results for “review of madden football 08 vs ncaa football 09”]
Blogs are talking about Cuil. And google is explaining away how many pages they have indexed [possibly] as a precursur to the release of cuil.
I tried again to search for
- I am Legend [Great results--helpful]
- I am Legend the book [Not even close...]
I’m not yet impressed. But I hope that it will improve in time. For $33M I’d expect a little more.
I enjoy the 3-column approach and the article format of the results with little pictures on the side. However, I wish that the simple, uncluttered page had more information and explanations when it comes up with a dead-end search. Like perhaps an option to complete the search in google <grin>.
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