As I'm writing this post it seems as though the biggest web story today is the emergence of Cuil.  Cuil, which is a gaelic word pronounced "cool" that means knowledge, is a search engine.  Big deal, right?  There's a ton of them.  What makes Cuil special is that it has been given life by former Google employees.  A little more interesting, right?  Despite there being some nice Google alternatives out there (I love ask.com's interface) no one has been able to come close to toppling the search engine giant.

Cuil also has a larger search index than any competitor.  They boast three times as many pages as Google and ten times as many as Microsoft's Live search.  Not only that but they rank websites differently than Google does - it's completely based on keywords and the content that surrounds them and how it relates to the rest of the page.  If this method turns out to be effective it could put an abrupt stop to the quest for linkbacks or the need for some sites to link farm in order to get a higher ranking in Google.  Of course that completely assumes that Cuil would be able to overtake Google as the standard search engine which, let's be honest, is a bit of a pipe dream at this point.

The last feature that Cuil has going for it is that it doesn't harvest user information like Google does.  All searches are completely anonymous and result suggestions are based on the content viewed in the search instead of a user's history.  That's a pretty good idea and these days I don't think anyone is turned off by a little more privacy online.  Again the site is definitely still to be proven, but it has a lot of ideas that could be huge if implemented properly.  We might finally be seeing the birth of a Google killer. 

There still are a couple of un-answered questions regarding Cuil though.  First of all, as I mentioned there's already been so much time and money invested by many companies into SEO aimed at the Google model, what would happen to all of that if Cuil took the forefront?  If their content-related search rankings really work would content finally become king?  I'm kind of torn on this subject.  On the one hand as a user I'd love for better content to get higher ranks.  On the other hand it might make it more difficult for smaller sites to ever get noticed.  Then again, every system can be gamed eventually so that probably wouldn't be as big of a concern in the end.

The next question is where does Cuil go from here?  In the beginning of this post I mentioned that they were getting a lot of buzz online, so much so that right now the search is unusable.  With Microsoft searching desperately for a company to help them make a play in the online search game plus the fact that Cuil is from former Google employees, I could see them being bought very quickly.  If not from Microsoft then maybe by one of their competitors as a defensive move.  I dunno, maybe I'm nuts but this seems like a no-brainer if you're Microsoft.  They could pick up Cuil, leave Yahoo behind to fade away and start making progress in their mission to compete with Google.

All of that is just future speculation at this point, but I think it'd be worth your time to go check the site out and try running a few searches if the servers are functioning by the time this post goes up.  It has an interesting user interface and might just turn up some decent results for you!

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