Cuil.com (irish word for both ‘knowledge’ and ‘corner’ apparently)  is a new search engine set to rival Google in world search domination. It’s been setup in California by an Irishman Tom Costello and his wife Anna Patterson, a former Google employee.

So, intrigued by the Irish name and connections and the boast that Cuil is allegedly the “world’s biggest search engine”, I went to Cuil.com and done a few searches. The site borrows on the Google minimalist philosophy with only a single graphic of the word CUIL and a search box. The site is dark with a black background and while my own main site is dark also, I’m not sure if its appropriate for a site with such lofty ambitions and function.

From what I understand, Cuil works differently to existing search engines in that it indexes page content relevant to your search terms and in a more ‘Semantic’ way. It also grabs an image off your site that it deems relevant and displays it in the search results page which is in tabular rather than list format which might take some getting used to for those of us used to google results.

My search for ‘web design leitrim’ returns no sign of my site or others I know of locally but I’m all over page 1 in google for the same term! The founders are quoted as saying that Cuil can do a much faster job of indexing the internet which is growing too fast for traditional search engines and that it can index much more content. However, if I’m not appearing in the first 4 pages while other web design sites with no relevance to Leitrim are then I’m not sure if its doing a proper job!

It also seemed a touch slower to navigate through results pages than google perhaps because of the images which aren’t necessary in my opinion.

I’ll be sticking with google but make your own mind up!

Leon