Is Cuil Cool Enough to Take on Google?

Cuil is pronounced "cool" and what makes it potentially cool is the participation of former Google search architect Anna Patterson and her husband, Stanford professor Tom Costello, as well as other prominent search tech folk. (Where have we seen that minimalist home page before, eh?)

Cuil purports to have a larger search index than Google's, and to be faster, and to be better than everything than Google. Of course, if it wasn't, why would I use it instead of Google, right?


Search results (example above, for the "iPhone 3G") are decidedly non-minimalist (click to enlarge). Speed reader that I am, I prefer more results per page with little if any "fluff." Still, that's me, and perhaps not you. It would be nice to see some preferences to allow this to be changed.

There's no specific news search, though news shows up in the results, as with Google. Speed-wise, I can watch Cuil render the page of results, so it's not faster, but it's certainly fast enough.

Results-wise, while top results on both Google and Cuil for "iPhone 3G" turn up, who else, Apple, results after that for Cuil are pretty old news stories on the iPhone 3G. Meanwhile, Google has more recent results.

There is something Cuil seems to be better at than Google: privacy. Here's their privacy policy:

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.

Cuil is relatively new, and thus will have some growing pains. Will it replace the word "Google" as a verb on TV shows and the like? Probably not. Will it gain market share? Time will tell.

Cuil is an old Irish word for knowledge, according to the site.