There is a new search engine started by couple of old Google people and someone from IBM,
it's called Cuil and I hope it will get popular and grow, so I can finally replace Google
From "About Cuil" :
Cuil.com said:
Welcome to Cuil—the world’s biggest search engine. The
Internet has grown. We think it’s time search did too.
The Internet has grown exponentially in the last fifteen years but search engines
have not kept up—until now. Cuil searches more pages on the Web than anyone
else—three times as many as Google and ten times as many as Microsoft.
Rather than rely on superficial popularity metrics, Cuil searches for and ranks
pages based on their content and relevance. When we find a page with your
keywords, we stay on that page and analyze the rest of its content, its concepts,
their inter-relationships and the page’s coherency.
Then we offer you helpful choices and suggestions until you find the page you
want and that you know is out there. We believe that analyzing the Web rather
than our users is a more useful approach, so we don’t collect data about you
and your habits, lest we are tempted to peek. With Cuil, your search history is
always private.
Cuil is an old Irish word for knowledge. For knowledge, ask Cuil.
I really like their
philosophy as well:
Cuil.com said:
Cuil analyzes the Web, not its users
Privacy is a hot topic these days, and we want you to feel totally comfortable using our service. Because
Cuil analyzes Web pages and not click-throughs, we don’t need to know your search history and habits. 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
cookie. Your search history is your business, not ours. We don’t need to keep logs of our users’ search
activity, so we don’t. For further details, read our
Privacy Policy. Don’t worry, it’s short and to the point.
No legal mumbo-jumbo.
I for one am tired of Google and especially their rather shady privacy policies and all the legal
mumbo-jumbo of it, so I welcome this new site and hopefully the new search method will
work better than Google as well, it's different in any case.
The recent Viacom vs. YouTube lawsuit should already make you want to move from Google
and their stupid "we log everything you do" policies.
I have been testing Cuil a bit and so far it seems pretty ok, it's a bit slow and the results are
mainly american sites, which some might find bad, but I love it.
There is no stupid localization here, which I hate about Google, if I type Google.com I wanna
go to Google.com, not Google.se, just cos I happen to live in Sweden.
I don't read Swedish, so 50% of the results are useless and yes, I know I could change it by
accepting their cookie, but here we get to my trust issues with Google again.
The results are displayed better, IMO, than Google too, 2 or 3 columns with a small picture
and a fairly long snippet of the page with the result, so far I like it, no endless scrolling like
on most Google searches.
There is a lot of stuff about Google I hate, one of them being all the reseller sites you get
when searching for example for reviews, Cuil doesn't seem to have this issue, this might be
due to the way the engine searches or it could be cos they haven't payed Cuil to put them
on top, I don't really know if Google does this, but I wouldn't be surprised or maybe the
resellers just abuse the Google engine, which seems more likely.
In any case, here you don't get 3 pages of resellers when looking for a review on something.
I haven't accepted Cuils cookie yet, so I'm not sure how much things can be changed, I will
save this for when I get back from my vacation and on to my own computer.
Anyway, the site should get better with the speed and results, they were a bit surprised by
the popularity it seems, the site was reported by a few tech sites, so they had a rush of
people testing the engine and apparently their servers weren't quite up to that yet.
I guess a lot of people want an alternative to Google, competition can never be bad.
They seem to be up now and working quite fast.
Check it out here:
Cuil.com
