Cuil

My communication channels today have been all a buzz about Cuil (pronounced “cool”), a new search engine. From emails from colleagues about its privacy features and google-like simple search appeal to Twitter blasts about its broken messages from being overloaded already on launch day, I couldn't help missing that there was a new player on the net.

The jury’s still out for me, but for those you whose channels weren't flooded (at least like mine) here’s a bit about its claims announced today...

“MENLO PARK, Calif.—July 28, 2008—Cuil, a technology company pioneering a new approach to search, unveils its innovative search offering, which combines the biggest Web index with content-based relevance methods, results organized by ideas, and complete user privacy. Cuil (www.Cuil.com) has indexed 120 billion Web pages, three times more than any other search engine.

Cuil (pronounced COOL) provides organized and relevant results based on Web page content analysis. The search engine goes beyond today’s search techniques of link analysis and traffic ranking to analyze the context of each page and the concepts behind each query. It then organizes similar search results into groups and sorts them by category.

Cuil gives users a richer display of results and offers organizing features, such as tabs to clarify subjects, images to identify topics and search refining suggestions to help guide users to the results they seek.”

It will be interesting to see if Cuil can pull it off. The privacy claims are a big deal ... at least IMHO :)