Uncool sideshow
The only thing remarkable about the launch of Cuil, a new search engine developed by former Google employees, is the saturation coverage it has received.
The problem is that Cuil, pronounced “cool” and based on the Gaelic word cuill, is anything but cool. Also, the search engine’s results are spotty at best. On a few searches we tried of SA-related information, Google consistently returned superior results.
The idea behind Cuil is a good one. Instead of the terse results spat out by Google, Cuil provides longer results and pictures with most items. It also doesn’t keep a record of users’ search activity and their Internet Protocol addresses, meaning it’s more private than Google.
But why has just about every major newspaper r un a story about the new “Google killer”. Is the world really so desperate for a competitor to Google that it will latch onto anything, even something as unexciting as Cuil?
If that’s the case, and I doubt it is, then people are looking in the wrong place. Google’s big rival is not some start-up, but rather Microsoft, the world’s biggest software company.
If you really want an alternative to Google, check out Microsoft’s Live Search (live.com). The software giant has invested many times Cuil’s US$25m in venture capital funding in refining its search product, and the results demonstrate this clearly. Google is not worried about Cuil. But it is scared to death of Microsoft.
Cuil versus Google – give your views
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