Oh, yet another search engine claiming to be better than Google. Yeah I am talking about Cuil which went live yesterday on 28th July. It is a search engine which not only shows the search result but also display some content with thumbnail pictures if available. This search engine claims to have a larger index than any other search engine including Google on internet, with about 120 billion web pages. Cuil is launched by some former employees of Google, Anna Patterson, Russell Power and Louis Monier. The search engine company has already raised $33 million from venture capitalist firms. The name of the search engine is inspired from a Celtic folklore character called Finn McCuill.

However I didn’t find this search engine much impressive due to these reasons.

• Its response time is too higher than that of google that is why they are not showing the time taken by the search query.
• Its search results are not as appropriate as that of google. For search query Abhishek Kumar, I am no where on their search result whereas on google I am on top. For this reason my heart will never praise this new search engine.
• It claims to index more than 120 billion web pages but my one and half year blog website is still not indexed. So I have doubt on their claim of largest search engine on internet. Also if you search google on google.com they show 2,670,000,000 search results for google whereas on cuil I only found 516,386,388 results for google.
• They are talking about size only, not quality. Even in size I doubt they are greater than Google.
• A large number of facilities which are there in Google like spell check and suggestion (it is there but not working properly), file, image, blog search, regional sites search, local search etc. are missing.

I am not completely against Cuil. There are some nice features which I must appreciate.

• Just type a search query, you’ll see a search suggestion with an icon representing a website and if you click on this link and you will go directly to that website. During introduction of this feature they commented on Google that not everyone feels lucky.
• They also show choices and suggestions through tabs. For example, if you search “music” there will show the related search items like music downloads, sheet music, free music etc. You have to click on the tab and Cuil search show you the search results related to that query.

I also compared Cuil with Google. What I did, I searched for musec which is wrong spelling for music in both the search engines. I got these results.

In Google I got correct spelling suggestion.

In Cuil there was no suggestion for searching the keyword musec.

But we can’t expect everything just on the first day of launch. We have to wait and watch how they progress and innovate new ideas.