Search 121,617,892,992 Web pages. That’s what new search engine Cuil (pronounced “cool”) promises when you need to find information online.
Cuil’s hook is that they analyze webpage content rather than just looking at a site’s popularity (Google, they’re looking in your direction). Founded by former Google employees, a lot of Cuil’s features seem to be in direct response to things they didn’t like about Google — there’s the photo-negative black background, results that incorporate pictures rather than plain text only, searching far more pages, and Cuil doesn’t collect user data or track what you search. Even the name — cuil is an old Irish word for knowledge — takes the same approach as Google’s new Knol encyclopedia, which they define as a unit of knowledge.
Reactionary upstart or anti-copycat? The correct answer is, “I don’t care.” I gave Cuil a spin and it seems to work well (though the images it pulled up were often pretty random). I think looking at results in a new way can help me find what I’m looking for, or to find some neato new thing I wasn’t expecting. Now that’s pretty Cuil cool. -BILL FERRIS
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