Cuil, meaning wisdom or knowledge in Gaelic and pronounced as ‘cool’, is the much hyped new search engine which was launched on Monday as a direct competition to Google! But it looks high only on hype and ambition and doesn’t come anywhere near Google, Yahoo! or Microsoft in performance.

Brainchild of ex-Google staffer Anna Patterson and her husband, Cuil claims ability to index 120 billion web pages! But Google can scan more than a trillion pages while indexing only useful ones. The hype surrounding ‘better than Google’ search engine surely helped in getting finances for the project. But all hopes dashed when it crashed within few hours after the launch! It couldn’t handle the huge traffic. Moreover, those who did get a chance to use the engine have rated it only ‘fair’ on performance.

The only area where Cuil scores is on privacy, it doesn’t store user specific searches like Google does! But this is not a persuasive factor to switch over from good old Google. Many will continue to persist in their endeavor to make something more perfect than Google. But that can only be a good enough excuse to open shops, get finances and work on programs - one cannot improve upon an almost perfect Google so easily!

source: Time