Cuil is a search engine that organizes web pages by content and displays relatively long entries along with thumbnail pictures for many results. It claims to have a larger index than any other search engine, with about 120 billion web pages. Cuil launched in July 2008 with an index of 121,617,892,992 web pages. According to Alexa, the site reached a peak of just over 0.2% of worldwide internet users in late July 2008 and by September 12, 2008, it had dropped to 0.02% and ranked as the 5,340th site by traffic. By October 13, 2008, it had dropped to 0.005% and ranked as the 21,960th site in traffic.
Rather than rely on superficial popularity metrics, Cuil searches for and ranks pages based on their content and relevance. When we find a page with your keywords, we stay on that page and analyze the rest of its content, its concepts, their inter-relationships and the page’s coherency.
Cuil's distinctive design, in which results appear in three columns across the page, also allows for longer previews of each site's content. But other search sites make better use of page real estate. SearchMe, which launched earlier this year, offers full-page snapshots in its results, through which you can flip like the album covers on iTunes. And the No. 4-ranked search engine, Ask, also uses a wider layout to display both images and sub-categories for refining one's search.
There are four major areas that Cuil is putting out to distinguish itself from other services. These are: Big web index, Unique relevance algorithm, Unique results display and Privacy.
Cuil could be a wild success that eclipses Yahoo and Microsoft and does threaten Google itself.
