Today I caught up on my reading. Normally I read Hacker News and Reddit programming lists each day. But I went on vacation and got a couple days behind. There seemed to be a lot of articles about "cuil". Now I had not heard of this term before. Luckily I found a web page which explained it to me. Cuil is a search engine that is attempting to compete with Google. So I did a Google search on it. Here is what I have gathered.Cuil claims to be a more comprehensive search than Google. It has 120 billion web pages in its index. The word cuil is supposed to sound like kewl. Cuil is an old Irish word meaning knowledge or wisdom. It does not collect information on its users like Google does. The site was unleashed on Monday, when the servers powering it crashed under a heavy load.
The company behind Cuil was formed in 2006 by ex-Google employees. Currently it has 30 employees. It has raised around $33 million so far from investors. The company claims that it searches three times as many pages as Google, but does it with less servers.
I do not know the extent of Cuil's capabilities. The search engine had exactly one chance to make a first impression on me. So I search for black of hat. Cuil could not find my blog. I then searched for "black of hat" in quotes. Cuil was still unable to show my blog in their search results. So I popped over to Google. My blog is listed on page 1 for a Google search of "black of hat". For now I am sticking with Google. Enough said.
