Today on Monday, July 28, 2008 a new search engine called Cuil was launched.

Its address is:

http://www.Cuil.com/

Cuil claim that they search more pages on the Web than anyone else, even more than Google and Live. They say they search three times more than Google and ten times more than Microsoft (Live).

The makers of the Cuil search engine say it should provide better results and show them in a more attractive manner.

I went to Cuil to search for some keywords. It was hard to reach Cuil. Initially I just couldn’t get to the server.

It said:
We’ll be back soon…
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.
Thanks for your patience.

Finally when I got, I was surprised to see Cuil finding zero results for many popular keywords. Even for a keyword like “Home Loan”, Cuil returned zero results.

Though I managed to find a keyword for which Cuil returned some results. The results are shown in a different format than many search engines display.

The results are splattered in a 3 column on the screen. We have an option to make it to 2 column. When I made it 2 column, the space in the right (3rd column) was left blank. I guess in the future Cuil will only allow 2 columns as it will fill the 3rd column with paid ads.

I can’t comment on the quality of the results as it’s the web surfers who will decide how good the new search engine is.

Cuil will not rely on inbound links like Google to rank websites, but will study the content and overall relevance of WebPages to find their relevance to a search query.

The reason for this is they don’t believe in analyzing the users of the web, but the web itself.

Since user habits are not important to Cuil, they don’t collect data of what you search online.

Cuil is owned by Anna Patterson and her husband Tom Costello. Anna Patterson was working at Google in the starting years. She worked there for two years. She was responsible to build some of the formulas Google uses for its search engine ranking.

If you find any information about this new search engine Cuil, please leave a comment.