The tech world is all abuzz over a new search engine launched Monday by former Google wizards. Cuil (pronounced Cool) is hyped to be the next big happening in the search engine market, which could end Google's dominance. Saudi Gazette checked out Cuil and here's what we found: POSITIVES Search Results appear in a refreshily new magazine style layout – with pictures. Explore by Category - Relevant categories come up with your search results. Privacy Policy - Unlike Google, Cuil does not log any user information. No IPs, no usernames, no tracking of user behavior at all. A big and a huge difference for users. Built on analyzing web pages. The search results are built on understanding the context of the keywords so as to give proper results rather than results based on just popularity or the number of hits. This logic is expected to give more relevant hits and is good for encyclopedic searches. Technology - High and competitive speed with fewer servers in use. NEGATIVES Results are not very relevant or sometimes very few results or no results appear – this despite Cuil's claim of having indexed three times more pages than Google. Lots of development and other work remains to be done. Cuil launched as a fully functional search engine (hence the hiccups) while Google took years to test and ran a Beta version to improve their search. Only English - No regional languages yet. Cuil's mission statement The Internet is getting bigger and more disorganized every day. Cuil's goal is to solve the two great problems of search: how to index the whole Internet—not just part of it—and how to analyze and sort out its pages so you get relevant results. Cuil's founders worked with other search engines and knew that tinkering with old systems wouldn't work. A fundamentally different approach was needed. So we've developed new architecture and algorithms that can handle the exponential growth of the Internet and organize results that reflect its enormous complexity. What's Google saying Google still believes its index is the largest Who's behind Cuil Tom Costello, CEO and Founder Ph.D. in Computer Science from Stanford University. Created Xift - a revolutionary search engine. Developed prototype of WebFountain in IBM . Former member of IBM's Strategy Team. Anna Patterson, President and Founder Architect of Google's large search index, TeraGoogle. Technical lead, Web ranking groups at Google, In charge of GoogleBase, and manager for the core piece of Google's ad-matching technology. Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and Research Scientist at Stanford University. Russell Power, VP of Engineering and Founder. Technical lead of TeraGoogle. Worked on Web ranking and automatic spam detection project. Ph.D. candidate in computer science, University of Washington. First user reactions There's no way any startup in the world can outperform Google. – Erick Schonfeld, co-editor of Silicon Valley tech blog TechCrunch. After a day of searching on Cuil and comparing those results to Google, Google wins out every time, returning more results and more relevant results. – ABC News You don't get $33 million to compete against Google. That's a suicide mission. You get $33 million to create a search experience that's different from Google. – Technology forecaster Paul Saffo __
