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 Policy

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:
Logs

We 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.