Cuil (pronounced [kuːl], "cool", according to the creators) is a search engine that organizes web pages by content and displays relatively long entries along with thumbnail pictures for many results. It claims to have a larger index than any other search engine, with about 120 billion web pages. It went live on July 28, 2008. Cuil is managed and developed largely by former employees of Google, Anna Patterson and Russell Power. The CEO and co-founder, Tom Costello, has worked for IBM and others. The company has raised $33 million from venture capital firms including Greylock.

While CUIL went live , there was a huge hype that it is going to kill google, given it's size of indexed page. But almost 10 months nearing, Cuil wasn't able to make a mark, even the  slightest on Google or it's near rivals yahoo, microsoft. The popularity went on dwindiling. Now the rank of Cuil according to alex is somewhere hovering about 13,000 to 18,000. You can have a look  click here  to see the performance of cuil on ALEXA (the site which gives ranks depending on popularity) .

"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 . 

Our experiments with the Cuil Search engine are provided here.

No results from Wikipedia

One thing that was noticed, the Cuil never returned any results from the Wikipedia. It isn't clear if Cuil is biased against displaying these, but it seems like a strange omission. Especially in  searches for historical figures, the results would have been far better if they had included Wikipedia articles. The top results for "Hitler Biography," for example, is a biography on BioAndLyrics, a site which copies the related Wikipedia article and suggests we also look at his discography . Discarding the biggest user created Encyclopedia is highly unexpected of a search engine.

Different from Others

The most important difference between Cuil and Google is its ranking system. Rather than assigning priority to pages based on inbound links as Google does ("Pagerank"), Cuil analyzes the content of Web pages to divine their relevance to a search query. Costello bristled when I asked if this was a semantic search engine like PowerSet (recently sold to Microsoft). Costello said Cuil's search is "contextual," and that, "we're trying to understand the real world, not the Web." But the more we try to serach with CUIL , the more confusing it's results are. It's tabbed suggestions and layout are cool, but not so helpful.

The one area where Cuil excels, however, is user privacy. Whereas Google stores user-specific searches for up to 18 months, Cuil never stores personally identifiable information or search histories. Privacy has become a growing concern among users of search sites ever since America Online inadvertently released the searches of 658,000 of its users in 2006. But that's unlikely to be enough to persuade most users to switch from their search engine of choice.

Our Verdict

So finally our verdict is " Cuil is worth a try " . But we are unhappy to say that when Google, yahoo repeatedly indexed our pages and daily visit our site. Cuil has made it's first visit to our site very recently. And we got to know of CUIL then only  .  This tells the poor popularity of this Search Engine.

Click Here to give a try on the new search engine