How Cuil are you? A new search engine tries to bid for your attention.

No, I did not misspell "cool" in the title of this post. The word "cuil", pronounced "cool" according to the founders of the new Cuil search engine, is an old Irish word for knowledge. And also according to Cuil, they have launched "the world's biggest search engine." A tall claim to make, this new search engine available now at cuil.com is nothing more than an interesting curiosity, at least for now.

Started by "ex-Googlers", Cuil has received an incredible amount of press not just in the tech world, but also in the more main stream press. Their own press release starts with:

"Cuil, a technology company pioneering a new approach to search, unveils its innovative search offering, which combines the biggest Web index with content-based relevance methods, results organized by ideas, and complete user privacy. Cuil (www.Cuil.com) has indexed 120 billion Web pages, three times more than any other search engine."

The validity of their claims, both in terms of size and innovation, remain to be seen. As for size of the search engine, Google no longer publishes the size of their content database - so it's not that easy to verify Cuil's claim. As for innovation, other than a cool looking and very simplistic (ala Google) interface, it's hard to tell but I am skeptical. I do know that for the websites that I support, my client websites, few seem to be "indexed". Even our own website, ActionOnline.cc, does not come up. True, I've not submitted it - BUT, if someone is going to make a claim about being the biggest search engine, one must first figure out a way to make sure that the little sites (the ones people are going to search to "see" if they really are bigger) are at least there! By the way, how did they decide what to include in their index? I wonder if they "Googled" a bunch of sites and started there!

But credibility aside, what is most interesting to me is not whether or not they are "better" (they clearly won't be for quite some time) but instead that they can "be anything" at all! In a world where Microsoft is trying to buy Yahoo's search business because their combined market share is so small that they still trail "WAY" behind Google, a couple of ex-google people managing to get VC money to build a new search engine is just amazing to me. Microsoft, with all it's mightly millions in cash cannot get this much attention nor build a decent search engine - but a few googlers can? What does that say about the state of Microsoft and Yahoo?

Make no mistake, Google's dominance is NOT at all threatened by this new search engine, but Microsoft and Yahoo definitely are and their respective executives should take notice and react quickly.

Hey, here's an idea for Steve Ballmer of Microsoft: buy Cuil! I am sure they'll take a lot less than $33 per share and they certainly can't have any hugely inflated egos about their greatness! Or do they?