Cuil enters the fray

The interesting news today was the launch of Cuil (pronounced cool), a search engine that boasts having a larger number of pages that Google in it’s index. While this may sound like a good thing, in theory Google does a great job of filtering out duplicate pages and spam sites; so if Cuil has a large number of these, it’s not going to help it’s cause.

Response seems to be mixed, from people claiming it’s a great new search engine, to others who feel there’s still some way to go. Thing is, the number of people trying it out has meant some serious scaling issues have come to light, but this is to be expected out of something in it’s infancy. As some points say: everyone loves a Google killer, but the initial inability to cope with people giving it a try could end up driving away the early adopters that can make the project successful.

At the end of the day, I think the measure of Cuil’s success will be whether it manages to persuade people it can do a better job that Google. I still remember the first time I tried Google, and the fact that it enabled me to find what I want was an immediate deal-clincher for me. Cuil needs to be able to do something similar, to stand out from the crowd. At the moment, the only search engine that does this in my mind is SearchMe, giving a visual representation of what you’re looking for. I’m not quite sure how useful it is to me yet, but it’s immediately apparent that it’s “different”