Projo Subterranean Homepage News

Later: I just noticed that Cuil's result for "cuil" are all about Ireland.

New search engine Cuil (pronounced "cool") launched last night, the brainchild of ex-Google employees.

From the info page,

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. We believe that analyzing the Web rather than our users is a more useful approach, so we don't collect data about you and your habits, lest we are tempted to peek. With Cuil, your search history is always private.

Cuil is an old Irish word for knowledge. For knowledge, ask Cuil.

Displaying in two or three columns, fewer results appear per page than at Google, and -- surprising, considering they boast an index of 120 billion web pages -- holes in their coverage aren't hard to find.

A search for "wisteria seedpod" and "wisteria seed pod" -- some appeared in my yard and I want to know what to do next -- turned up no results at all. Google returns many sites that tell me they will brown and burst open in fall, dispersing seeds that are poisonous unless you are a giraffe or a monkey.

More mainstream searches turn up lots of suggestions in a sidebar. Ask Cuil about "filet mignon" -- that's the image above -- and you'll get a selection of recipes and online sources, with a sidebar of suggestions: Cuts of Beef, Cooking Techniques, Blackadder Characters (?), American Chefs, Culinary Institute of America Alumni.

What I call "homework searches" -- big ol' topics like "American Revolution" -- fare better.

Not compelling to me at first glance, but it's just getting started. As happens during many launches, the crush of traffic brought its servers down briefly last night. It's up and humming today, though. Background and a different user's test drive at TechCrunch.

Cuil.com, if you want to kick the tires.

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