Cuil. Could this be a real alternative to Google?

After year of watching Google become more and more of a propaganda tool for the left, (see Aid and Comfort on Google, e-doublespeak? i-resist!, Blogger.com Makes It Too Easy to Censor Blogs - What to Do?, and Ask not what Digg can Do for You), many of us have been looking for an alternative search engine.

Sure, there have always been alternatives, but until now, they’ve always been too specialized for general use, too much like Google, or have just not lived up to what we’ve come to expect from Google. Google’s a great search engine from a technical, but it has become a battleground for truth.

If only some of the folks who run Google would come to their senses, and “fix” the problems. Well, guess what? The folks who have developed “Cuil,” say that they’ve done just that:

Cuil searches more pages on the Web than anyone else—three times as many as Google and ten times as many as Microsoft.

Rather than rely on superficial popularity metrics, Cuil searches for and ranks pages based on their content and relevance. When we find a page with your keywords, we stay on that page and analyze the rest of its content, its concepts, their inter-relationships and the page’s coherency.

Then we offer you helpful choices and suggestions until you find the page you want and that you know is out there.

Cuil (”knowledge”) is developed and run by folks with years of web and search engine development experience (including inside Google), and is currently privately funded. It has some great features, including Drilldown, rollover definitions, and navigation suggestions:

• Biggest Internet search engine—Cuil has indexed 120 billion Web pages, 3x more than any other search engine
• Organized results—Cuil’s magazine-style layout separates results by subject and allows further search by concept or category
• Different results—Unlike other search engines, Cuil ranks results by the content on each page, not its popularity
• Complete privacy protection—Cuil does not keep any personally identifiable information on users or their search histories

It looks very different from the other search engines and takes a little getting used to. The algorithm is also very different from the other search engines. To make your own blog effectively searchable on Cuil, you will need to appropriately use categories and tags (I ran a few preliminary tests on FHK and a few other blogs, and the posts that were tagged and categorized properly showed up on Cuil - the others did not.) The other two features that I’m used to on Google that are not included in Cuil are the “Images” and “News.” The results are not sorted by date. Perhaps if the Cuil folks receive enough requests for these features via their contact page…?

Over the next couple of weeks, I encourage everyone to give Cuil a try. You may even want to run parallel searches on Google (or your current favorite search engine), and Cuil, and let me know what you think. I’d like to do a follow-up in a few weeks to see if FHK readers think Cuil really has what it takes to compete with Google.