Cuil can prove to be one of the biggest rivals of Google in coming days, especially after it’s big-bang launch. Cuil is an old Irish word for knowledge. Cuil is pronounced as “cool”. It is launched by a team of four members who were all once employees of Google. Cuil has indexed 120 billion web pages, which according to them is 3 times more than any other search engine. It is also interesting to know that Google has never disclosed the size of their index. The ranking method adopted by cuil is also different as it ranks by content rather than popularity which is used by Google. So lets explore cuil.

The first thing that strikes your mind when you open cuil is “Blackle.com“. Cuil comes with a black background in order to save energy. But the thing that matters the most is the search results. The results are fairly good with an interesting concept to display them. Each result has an image(if any) and a few lines from the web page of the result.

You can get more results for your query under “Explore by category”  present at the top right side of the page. As I have entered the query “joker of dark knight” so the category results are as follows

Another important feature of the site is “safe search” which filters the pornographic sites from your search results and it also provides you with typing suggestions. You can enable or disable both these options from “Preferences” present at the top of the page.

The Founders of Cuil are:-

1. Tom Costello (creator of a prototype of Web Fountain for IBM)

2. Anna Peterson (creator of Google’s Teragoogle-index)

3. Russel Power (one of the programmers that worked on Google spam filters and rankings)

4. Louis Monier (co-developer of  Babelfish ,Altavista, and the new eBay search engine).

All works well with Cuil but I still strongly believe that it is very hard to beat Google because its the simplicity of Google that makes it popular. For instance the readability of results of Google is excellent that is you can easily go through the results even rapidly that are displayed on the web page whereas in Cuil I found it a bit difficult to go through the results rapidly.

So tell us about your opinion on the fate of Cuil by posting your comments.