Competition for Google?
Another piece of interesting news this week. A new search engine site is being launched by former employees of Google, with the intention of challenging Google for the top slot.
The site’s name is Cuil (pronounced cool), which is Gaelic for Knowledge. It has been founded by Tom Costello, a former employee at IBM, and his wife Anna Patterson, who worked for Google for three years. They say that the existing search engines have not kept up with the rapid expansion of the Internet and claim that their search engine will cover more websites than any of its rivals. Three times more than Google and ten times more than Microsoft. Google does not reveal the size of its search index, though estimates put it at around 30 to 50 billion web sites. In comparison, Cuil claims to have already indexed 120 billion.
Cuil search results are not sorted by popularity. They are sorted by content and it displays them in columns with an image and some brief descriptive text. They call this new way of presenting hits “organised results” and claim that they are easier to read this way.
Another difference between Cuil and Google is that Google saves user data and Cuil does not. Cuil says it wants to analyse the web, not users. This would be of particular interest to people who are interested in privacy and data security issues.
Google is a massive organisation, which has dominated the search engine market for years. It will be interesting to see if Cuil can challenge Google. Many have tried before and failed, so in my opinion it would take some ground breaking changes to enable this. The big question is, will people embrace these changes or stick to what they know? Many people don’t like change and won’t change, even when the change could be for the better.
This entry was posted on Wednesday, July 30th, 2008 at 1:33 pm and is filed under Articles, Business Advice, IT Advice . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
August 14th, 2008 at 1:56 pm
See additional article here