Cuil
A Brand New Search Engine
What is Cuil?
The name comes from an old Irish word meaning "knowledge." The philosophy of Cuil is to filter through all the meaningless and popular web-pages that normally pop up in search engine results and give serious web-surfers a look at more keyword-specific articles.
How Does Cuil Work?
Rather than use old algorithms, the Cuil team believes that the rapidly expanding internet will soon grow unwieldily for the likes of Google and Yahoo. They built their search engine around entirely new mathematic formulas (which are, of course, top secret).
The result is a search engine that does not select websites by popularity; instead Cuil searches for keywords, then analyzes the entire page for relevance to you, filtering through the popular links if the lesser-viewed web pages better meet your search criteria.
The Cuil Interface
Cuil looks cleaner and leaner than any other search engine. Rather than displaying hits in a descending list, Cuil organizes your results up, down, left, and right in a "wallpaper" pattern, complete with blocks of text and thumbnail images from the corresponding page.
Users can then tab through these page results if they need to look further. Limiting each page to about twelve results keeps the screen from being cluttered, but it also slows the speed of searching since you can't simply flick the wheel on your mouse and scroll the endless list of Google results.
Cuil Features
Cuil offers four main features to expedite the searching process:
- Drilldown: exploring by category
- Roll-over Definitions: additional information before you decide to click
- Tabs: clarify before you search
- Navigation Suggestions: let Cuil choose for you
Cuil Safe Search
Cuil offers a "safe search" option that parents can turn on. This allows children to use Cuil without fear of accidentally browsing upon adult content websites. This function is useful, but seems a bit to easy to turn off and on to be truly effective.
How Does Cuil Compare to Google?
Rather than replacing the empire of Google, it seems that Cuil will most likely supplement the search engines that are already in place. After a simple comparison test between the search results of Cuil and Google, it's easy to see that Cuil has some holes in its search net.
A recent search for "Dr. Horrible," one of the hottest internet videos around, resulted in no results from Cuil but well over ten relevant hits from Google.
There is something to be said for popularity, and it seems Google, for the time being, still retains its throne as the most popular internet search engine.
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