Will Cuil play out Google in future?

[asha]

Cuil is in spotlight
Last week, Internet world has witnessed the birth pangs of a new search engine ‘cuil.com’ (pronounced cool) claiming search volume three times the pages Google does. Having Irish roots and Google links Cuil, headquartered in California has caught by media may be due to two reasons –content based search results and privacy policy (strictly opposite to what is employed by Google) and Cuil’s ex-Google starters. The search engine was officially launched a few days ago and is enjoying its time in the spotlight with good and bad notes.
Cuil backgrounds
Built by former engineers of Google and Altavista and supported by former employees of eBay and IBM, high profiled Cuil arrests media attention from its announcement itself. Bloggers and journalists are now after this much hyped Google monopoly breaker Cuil -an old Irish word of knowledge chosen by its Irish founders led by husband-wife team Tom Costello (CEO of Cuil) and president as Anna Patterson, a search-engine researcher from Stanford University and a former Google technical lead along with former colleagues Russell Power, vice-president of engineering, and Louis Monier, vice-president of products. Cuil is a $30 million venture funded by Tugboat ventures, Greylock Partners and Madrone Capital Partners. Rather than popularity Cuil ranks search results by content analysis and returns fewer relevant results. It's an obvious attack at Google, which treats Web links as popular votes in ranking Web page relevance for a given search term. Cuil with its ‘black page’ plans to challenge the monopoly of Google in search engine industry, at the same time wants to change the surfing culture among users.
Google has responded with a lighter note that they are having highest number of web pages in the index and competition enhances better performance.
What makes Cuil different from Google?
#Cuil searches three times more than Google. Cuil search index spans over more than120 billion web pages and Google has 82 million web pages in its index according to their stats dated back three years (Google has not revealed web pages in its index for last three years).
#Cuil aims to rank the relevancy of search results by content analysis rather than by popularity, Google is using popularity and audience traffic to rank its pages.
#Another Cuil feature is its privacy policy- it doesn’t track any information about users –name, IP address and not by cookies. Google does record information about its users and their searches to improve the user experience and to deliver more relevant search results and advertisements.
Cuil’s privacy says “there is a separation between search and surveillance”
“Your search history is your business, not ours. When you search with Cuil, we do not collect any personally identifiable information, period. We have no idea who sends queries: not by name, not by IP address, and not by cookies (more on this later)”.
At Cuil, when the user types a query, sometimes search suggestions will appear and result page has specific search navigation links related to the query. Cuil has no menu options for images, maps, videos and news like Google. Unlike Google’s landing page multifarious options Cuil’s black opening page gives only search option.
What over heard from the Cuil users
But by the end of the site's first day, many users seemed to have disturbed in Cuil’s search results, sometimes a prominent site missed from the search results or Cuil's tendency to match photos of one person with Web pages related to someone else. Like in Wikipedia the top search results can be pushed back to the later pages that will be a trouble for those who are looking for a quick grasp. For the query ‘search engine optimization’ Cuil returns a result of 25,316,637 and Google retrieves 29,100,000 results, and the results are drastically different. If one is simply looking for web results, then this is not a problem.
Present search engine industry scene
Google is the unquestionable leader in the search engine industry with a clear lead over Yahoo and Microsoft, the third and fourth positions holders in the industry. Searching has been synonymous with Google and often termed as ‘Googling’. There were earlier similar attempts from Microsoft Corp and Yahoo Inc, but all turned futile.. Launched last year “Wikia search’ has also touted as a competitor to Google, but untouched Google’s dominion. When specifically tracking images, maps or a news story Cuil proves to be a little protracted and its stretched results across two or three columns seem laborious to the users. Cuil is yet to explore the possibilities of PPC ad programs. Though Cuil’s relevancy ranking and privacy policy is acknowledged by the industry, months ahead will determine its real knock.
Asha