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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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?<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n