Today marks the launch of a Cuil.com, a new search engined developed by former Google developer Anna Patterson. Her last search engine was bought by Google in 2004 and used to improve Google’s own search engine.

Patterson’s new search engine, Cuil (pronounced cool), is purportedly three-times more robust than Google and backed by over $30 million in venture capital. Already getting a lot of hype, Cuil promises to challenge web content developers seeking to have their sites found by search engines — which is pretty much anyone who owns a web site.

What we immediately like about Cuil: it’s new and provides healthy competition for what’s becoming a really large fish in a very small pond.

What we don’t immediately like about Cuil: searches return only pages using the exact phrase on a search string unless separated by a comma. In other words, if you type:

mortgage cruise

The results offer no hits because no pages use the exact phrase “mortgage cruise.”

But if you type:

mortgage, cruise

You’ll see search results for pages that include both mortgage and cruise, but not consecutively as a phrase.

Tags: Cuil, search engine, Search Engine Optimization

This entry was posted on Monday, July 28th, 2008 at 12:43 pm and is filed under Search Engine Optimization. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.