Cuil New Search Engine: Must Try.

The name is Cuil, pronounced “cool”. A new search engine that debuted today for the world to use and boasts they have indexed 120 billion webpages.

Created by former employees of Google the site has some features that make it stand out from Google and hope to attract a piece of their market share.

After checking it out for myself and searching things for a bit. I’ve come up with a short list of pros and cons.

Pros:

1. The lay-out - All search inquiries are displayed in with a magazine style format. It allows you to read a brief description of the page to see if you want to go read the rest. The look is very clean and easy to follow.

2. Thumbnail - For you visual people search inquiries now come with a thumbnail of the site.

3. New Search Technology - Attempts to understand more about the information on a page and the terms people use to search as opposed to Googles method of looking at quality links. In other words, their search algorithm can understand context of a page as well as concepts of search inquiries (which can be seen in the gray bar at the top of the page).

Translation: search results are more precise to what you are looking for.

4. Privacy - (best of all) They do not retain information of people’s searches. Anyone who is big on privacy rights will love this feature.

5. No Advertising - There is no advertising on the top or the sides. Of course this is for now and it’d be a good bet they’ll eventually have advertising.

Cons:

1. Thumbnail mismatch - It’s only happened a couple of times with me but sometimes the thumbnail you see may not match the page. This is a minor thing I’m sure they’ll easily tweak.

2. Pure Search - Unlike Google, there are no “Google Maps” for directions (a feature I use many times over), no button for “image search”, “Google News” and so forth.

For many people who are accustomed to Google a switch to a new SE may not be worth the time. Google has entrenched itself so deep into the our computer lives that it would be too bothersome or unfamiliar to go to another site, much like how many people would never use Mozilla over Internet Explorer.

The final verdict: Guilty of being pretty “Cuil” and useful. I will be giving it a try for a bit to see how it fares off against Google. Whether they join the long list of search engines that have fallen to Goliath Google or whether they become a competitor, it’s always nice to try something new.

Don’t take my word for it, try it out for yourself!