There is a lot of talk at the moment about a new search engine, called Cuil (pronounced “cool”, Cuil is an old Irish word for knowledge).

With Google seemingly in control of most searches & totally dominant in the UK market, what chance for a new upstart succeeding where many search engines have tried & failed. The difference between these other companies and Cuil could be the team behind the project:

• Anna Patterson: worked on Google’s search index
• Russell Power: worked on Google’s search index
• Louis Monier: founder of the AltaVista search engine
• Tom Costello: worked on IBM’s WebFountain project

The team behind Cuil have worked behind the scenes at Google and other major search providers and felt that tinkering with old systems wouldn’t work. They believed a fundamentally different approach was needed.

Cuil has four major claims with which it wants to distinguish itself from Google:

1. Cuil claims to have the biggest index

Cuil claims that its index is bigger than Google’s and that this is necessary if you want to return relevant results for topics that aren’t very popular. However, it has to be said that Cuil claims to have indexed 120 billion pages (3 times as many as Google), whereas recent reports from Google engineers claim that there are now more than one trillion unique URLs! Although they admit they don’t index every one of those trillion pages as many of them are similar to each other, or represent auto-generated content that isn’t very useful to searchers.

2. Cuil thinks that popularity is not as important as Google says

If Cuil’s concept of indexing succeeds, PageRank and linking might be a thing of the past. Cuil thinks that popularity is useful but not for very complex searches. According to their website, Cuil tries to analyse the actual content of web pages and put it into a greater context. Popularity has dominated search results so heavily that it gets harder and harder to find the page you want, especially if your search is a complex one. Cuil respects popular pages and recognises that for many simple searches, popularity is an easy answer to your question. But for a deeper search, establishing relevancy is more than a numbers game. Cuil prefers to find all the pages with your keyword or phrase and then analyse the rest of the content on those pages. During this analysis they discover that your keywords have different meanings in different contexts. Once they’ve established the context of the pages, they’re in a much better position to help you in your search.

3. Cuil uses a new results page format

Instead of a long list, Cuil returns the results in three columns and it adds images to the search results when possible. After you perform a search, you may see a panel on the right-hand side that says “Explore By Category” with a list of subjects related to your search. If you roll-over a category, it will open and show refinements related to your search. If you click on one, Cuil will direct you to this additional information. By looking at these suggestions, you may discover search data, concepts, or related areas of interest that you hadn’t expected. This is particularly useful when you are researching a subject you don’t know much about and aren’t sure how to compose the “right” query to find the information you need.

Cuil also offers roll-over definitions and offers ideas to refine your search. When you pause on a subject suggested by “Explore By Category,” a definition of that term may appear. This gives you additional information to help you decide whether or not to click on that term and so save you some time.

Cuil helps you to search by offering you other choices and suggestions. Cuil will show you “Tabs” that suggest ways to clarify your search. For example, if you search for “Jaguar,” there are a number of things you could be searching for, like Jaguar cars, Jaguar cats, a football team called the Jaguars, etc. Just click on the tab that reflects your interest and Cuil will narrow your search appropriately.

4. Cuil does not collect user data

In contrast to other search engines, Cuil does not log any personally identifiable information. IP addresses, names or cookies are not stored. That means that user data cannot be turned over to others. AOL published private user information in August 2006 and Google currently has to turn over massive amounts of user data to Viacom.

Cuil states “Privacy is a hot topic these days, and we want you to feel totally comfortable using our service. Because Cuil analyzes Web pages and not click-throughs, we don’t need to know your search history and habits. So our privacy policy is very simple: when you search with Cuil, we do not collect any personally identifiable information, period. We have no idea who sends queries: not by name, not by IP address, and not by cookie. Your search history is your business, not ours. We don’t need to keep logs of our users’ search activity, so we don’t.”

I have submitted all of my sites to Cuil; it’s interesting that you do this by e-mail (to crawlme@cuil.com), to request a visit from Twiceler, which is the name of the Cuil robot Web crawler. This was done at midday yesterday & Cashback Shopper is already featuring – a ranking check has revealed some interesting results!

The homepage is appearing for some terms, but a large number of the blog pages are appearing too (on page 1 in some cases), which don’t normally register highly on the other search engines. This would seem to back the claim that the Cuil search engine is pulling results from what it deems to be relevant keyword matching content, more so than the other search results.