Cuil It

July 28, 2008 – 10:25 pm

There was a significant debut on the Internet today: a search engine that may well give mighty Google a run for its money. It is the brainchild of Anna Patterson, who had previously written a search application that impressed Google so much they bought it in 2004, and hired her as a technical lead, when their own product needed a lift.

This one’s not for sale.

Posted by Malcolm on at 10:25 pm, filed under Technology. RSS feed for this post. Trackbacks are closed, but you can post a comment.

4 Comments

  1. Charles says

    Excellent!

    I noticed that it doesn’t give top billing for “liminality” to Wikipedia, which is interesting. Apparently it uses an entirely different algorithm from PageRank.

    I was disappointed to see that a search on “what is liminality?” (in quotes) does not lead to my essay on the subject, though–it just leads to the front page of my site. (And to add to the weirdness, the excerpt from my front page is from a *long* time ago… maybe that’s why it has a “history in short” icon next to it? Odd.)

    I’ll keep an eye on this one, though. It looks promising.

    Posted July 29, 2008 at 3:24 am | Permalink
  2. the one eyed man says

    A friend of mine drives around with tags which read GOOGOL1, which of course is the correct spelling for the number which has one hundred zeros. He acquired the url googol.com before Larry and Sergey started their search engine. They tried to buy the url from him in a nasty way, and he told them to get lost. This is why the search engine misspells the word googol.

    Posted July 29, 2008 at 11:28 am | Permalink
  3. Addofio says

    I tried it, and may try it again, but it gave me too many spam sites–full of gibberish and/or not there when you click on the link. Ended up going back to google to continue my search–seemed more efficient. Google may be erring in eliminating too many sites–but it seemed to me, after about 30 minutes of use, that cuil was erring on the side of including too many.

    Anyone know how to pronounce “cuil”?

    Posted July 29, 2008 at 11:35 pm | Permalink
  4. Malcolm says

    It’s pronounced “cool”.

    Posted July 31, 2008 at 8:22 am | Permalink

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