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Google Alternative?
Today was the launch of Cuil (pronounced “cool”), a new search engine that claims to be better and faster than Google.
There’s a big new search engine launching Monday: Cuil. Developed and run by the husband-and-wife team of Stanford professor Tom Costello and former Google search architect Anna Patterson, it’s pitched as bigger, faster, and better than Google’s flagship search engine in pretty much every way. See video interview with Tom Costello, below.
Unfortunately for them, their claims seem to have backfired on them. I just checked it out and the page says, “Due to overwhelming interest, our Cuil servers are running a bit hot right now. The search engine is momentarily unavailable as we add more capacity.” Well, duh? You go around claiming you’re bigger and badder than Google and of course you’re going to get Slashdotted and then some.
They seem to be taking the concerns from folks about privacy seriously, though.
Privacy is a hot topic these days, and we want you to feel totally comfortable using our service, so our privacy policy is very simple: 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). Your search history is your business, not ours.
More precisely:
LogsWe do not keep logs of our users’ search activity.
Nice touch.
I gotta say that I agree with everyone that the name is dumb. Then again, Google is dumb too. At least the pronunciation is obvious, though.
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oh honey, you have no idea how much irony there is in your linking to that post today . . . it almost makes me wanna cry.
let’s hope those academics make good.
Oh my, Prof BW. I hope everything is ok.
nope. and its google’s fault (for real). which is why your timing is . . . well. ‘nough said. Thanks for the info on the new engine hopefully wordpress will start using them. (and don’t tell me if google owns wordpress ok. I’m in denial.)
Well, sucks to hear that.
To my knowledge, Google doesn’t own WordPress, just Blogger.
It’ll be hard to rip the grip from Google, though. Once people are familiar with something, it’s tough to get them to move to something else.
I fooled around with Cuil yesterday for a few minutes–didn’t have any trouble accessing the site, but I did have problems accessing any meaningful search results. That’s the real problem they’re having right now. I have 3 sites linked to my personal name and my internet pseudonym, and cuil came up with exactly zero of them when I did a search for my name. It did, however, come up with a press release from ten years ago from my undergraduate university.
I could say the same as Incertus.
I looked for myself and a couple other things which knew what the results should be, and they weren’t cloe.
Oh well, I’ll give it a few weeks and try again.