Despite its Irish roots and Google links, new search engine Cuil cannot say it is feeling lucky today.

Cuil has been down for much of its launch day, presumably from the weight of traffic - a victim of the media hype (including our own story) and perhaps its own hubris.

When we interviewed Tom Costello, the Irish-born founder and chief executive last week , he told us Cuil was going for a full launch on Monday, rather than a gradual one.

That is very un-Google like in its avoidance of long beta testing and the current “Search. We’re working on it” error page suggests the decision may have been a mistake.

If you do manage to load the proper page, there are a number of other un-Google.com features to observe:

• • A drop-down suggestion box as you type your query means a quicker route to your answer and fewer page-views for Cuil - but it has no ads to serve at present.
  • A magazine-style three-column layout with pictures and fuller text makes a refreshing change from Google’s list pages.
  • Results are not based on popularity or topicality but intrinsic content. “We are offering something that’s more about the content of the page rather than how much traffic it’s getting,” said Mr Costello. This takes some getting used to. Like most people, I prefer to get current, popular results. A vanity search on my name on Google produces my latest blog post, my linkedin profile and my Friendfeed lifestream as three of the first four links. On Cuil, there are no direct links to me, with only two out of 11 links mentioning me in passing. Cuil seems broader and deeper, almost encyclopaedic, but appears very lacking in focus. Having said that, the demo Cuil gave showed a search for “Harry”, which did provide focus in the shape of different tabs for Harry Potter, Harry Truman, Prince Harry etc for disambiguation purposes. However, this has clearly not been fully implemented.
  • As Cuil does not care about popularity and therefore what its users are searching for, it does not keep logs. As well as saving a lot of space and processing power, this means it has unimpeachable privacy standards compared to Google, as it has nothing to keep private.

Then of course there is Cuil’s 120bn-page search index, which it claims is three times larger than Google’s and its technology that lets it use just a handful of servers for queries rather than the massed ranks of thousands used by Google per query.

This technology seems to be Cuil’s key advantage. It would have an easier job convincing other search engine companies to buy its cost-saving solution than persuading users to switch from Google, or use Cuil as their main alternative.

However, Mr Costello insisted Cuil was not just a showcase for its back-end technology.

“People need to have bigger ambitions, you have to try to change the world,” he said.

“The Silicon Valley venture capital thing is that it’s easy for people to say ‘Oh, I’ll build something to flip.’

“What we really care about is trying to build something which makes things better for people, which means the whole web is indexed, and if you create value for society, society hopefully will come back and reward you for it.”

Not as succinct as Google’s ‘Don’t Be Evil’ motto, but his comment shows Cuil is at least Google-like in its altruistic aims.

July 28, 2008 4:18pm in Digital media, Internet | Comment