Cuil is not cool

A new search engine has been set up. It's called 'Cuil' (pronounced 'cool'), has $33m in backing and it doesn't collect information about the surfing tendencies of users. Stories about it point out pluses like the size of its massive index (120 billion Web pages) and minuses like fewer total hits than what Google turns up when searching the same thing.

Formed by ex-Googlers, Cuil has been in development for the last three years and has attracted a huge amount of interest, coverage and upon launch - searches.

"Anybody who thought Cuil was this Google killer can really see now that no, that's not going to happen today — and the likelihood is that's not going to happen a year from now," says Danny Sullivan, internet search guru and editor-in-chief of SearchEngineLand.

Cuil's distinctive design, in which results appear in three columns across the page, also allows for longer previews of each site's content. But the acid test of any search site is the results it generates, and for now, anyway, Cuil falls way short of the industry's leaders, and even for that matter, of many startups.

Cuil has a distinctive, if old-fashioned, approach to indexing websites. Instead of ranking them based on popularity, as Google does, it focuses on the content of each page. That may make sense in theory — after all, the most popular restaurants, for example, rarely serve the best food — but it is precisely the model that Google broke away from in order to give users more relevant results.

"Obviously, there's a lot of interest in any stealth startup that's going to be a search engine. ... Everyone wants to know, 'Who's the next Google?'" said Erick Schonfeld, co-editor of Silicon Valley tech blog TechCrunch. "There's no way any startup in the world can outperform Google. The question really is whether or not Cuil can produce better results than Google can."