Are Ex-Employees Trying To Take Down Google?

By Ben Haber

By Ben

Well, they’re trying to. Anna Patterson and Tom Costello have launched a new search engine, Cuil (pronounced: cool), which they say searches more sites then any other search engine and knows how to analyze and sort its pages to get the most relevant results.

Sounds ‘cuil’.

The problem is that people don’t just use Google for search. It’s used for Gmail, iGoogle, Google maps, Google images, Google news, Google blogs, Google shopping, Google video – should I continue? Google is not successful just because it’s a search engine – it’s successful because of every other feature it brings to the user.

Getting back to the first point, Cuil claims that they’re superior to Google because they can search three times as many pages and produce more relevant results. My question is how we can know these extra pages are relevant and not spam sites? When I’ve searched Google, I’ve always had a lot of success, and almost always found what I’m looking for in the first couple results, or somewhere on the first page.

Also, Cuil organizes their pages in a much different format then Google, which may take a lot of getting used to for some. Instead of creating a list, it has a paragraph on each site scattered around the page.

Tom Costello told The New York Times, “I think it will be better, but there is no question that the public has to decide.”

Let the debate begin.

1 comment July 28th, 2008