New search engine: Is it Cuil enough?
Quick, here’s a chance for you to be an early adopter. The new search engine Cuil debuted this week with dreams of dethroning search giant Google.
Oh, and you may be wondering where the weird name came from. Cuil says its an old Irish word for knowledge. (By the way, it’s pronounced Cool)
The feisty new kid on the block claims to be the world’s largest search engine, built for a modern Internet. Not the old Internet that Google was designed to search.
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.
Based on early reviews, however, it seems that it may be a while before Google needs to worry.
MSNBC columnist Helen A.S. Popkin talks here about her love for Google and what Cuil doesn’t get.
PC Magazine’s review found it lacking when compared to other top search engines.
However, Cuil does get points for its privacy settings. The search engine keeps no information about you, says Information Week’s Thomas Claburn.
Have you tried Cuil? What do you think? Could it ever replace Google as your favorite search engine. Or is there another you like to use?
Tim has covered a wide range of topics, including tourism, crime, aviation and gambling, since becoming a reporter in 1990. The Oklahoma native joined the Post-Dispatch in 2007 after spending nine years in Orlando. In his spare time, he's often exploring one virtual world or another. He can be reached at tbarker@post-dispatch.com. 
Do a search for “baseball stats” and look at the defunct baseball teams on the right. reds? ha!
Anytime I see a “review” by a “pundit” that’s negative, that’s a sure winner for me. These morons don’t know anything. Most are probably in the tank for Google anyway. All I saw in the linked articles was a lot of whining about how Cuil isn’t Google. DUH. When Google first started, it couldn’t hold a candle to AltaVista. But now, if it isn’t a Google-killer out of the box, it must be trash. But, Cuil has the right idea, in that users DON’T WANT TO BE TRACKED. And that, my friends, is the key difference.
I liked it. It looks prettier than Google, and it brought up some different sites. I think I will use both Google and Cuil for different things though.