Cuil.com, a new search engine launched two days ago, is set to be another competitor for Google in the web search industry.

What makes this search engine different from others is the profile of its founders. Most of them are ex-employees of Google, Inc.  In particular, one of the main architects of this new search engine, Anna Patterson, was an important contributor of Google’s present search algorithm.

Attracting a lot of curious traffic, Cuil.com’s launch experienced such high traffic that the site was periodically out of service the first day.

According to some news sources, Patterson left Google because of its refusal to try innovative changes to their search algorithm. Anderson’s own search technology was acquired by Google in 2004, when her search algorithm was incorporated into Google’s search engine. She left Google for a new venture, creating another search engine with the debut of its self-proclaimed innovative search algorithm.

Unlike Powerset, the natural-language search engine recently acquired by Microsoft, Cuil focuses its full effort on improving the cost and speed of indexing web pages (with its search algorithms remaining a mystery to us), hoping to return more relevant and powerful search results to web surfers than Google.

Upon my first few attempts, the only thing that impresses me so far is the format of its output pages. The magazine-styled output page tries to provide pictures together with the search pages’ content to enrich the user’s search experience. Though from what I can tell, the pictures provided by its search result pages are mostly extractions from the returned web pages, and some of those (as you can probably imagine) are really silly extractions that hardly accurately represent the web sites recommended.

Most importantly, Cuil.com fails to return web pages that I know are important for a particular search term. I conducted an interesting test using this search engine to search its own name, “cuil”, but none of the returned web pages even show the web site’s own link, http://www.curl.com!

Interestingly, if I use Google to search for the same term, it returns the related news about curl.com, and indeed the first search result is the search engine’s own hyperlink http://www.curl.com (Quite ridiculous, eh?)

Whether this search engine can establish a foothold in the search engine industry remains unknown. But what can be sure is that the emergence of a new search engine provides us with more search choices in quality web surfing, and that is truly beneficial to all of us.

To Google, perhaps this is also another push to improve its search algorithm to handle the new competition. That could be good. In fact, this view is shared by Google itself. An official of Google said they welcome the new search engine to the competition, since it drives them to provide even more superior service to its customers.

I have set up a new Google Alert to track the term “cuil.com” for any updated news about this search engine. Have you?

Tags: Curl, curl.com, Google, Anna Patterson, Powerset

Tags

General Internet Marketing, Google