New Search Engines Cuil and SearchCloud try to unseat Google

When it comes to web searching the search engine at the top of the list for most people is Google. In fact it presently commands over 60 percent of the search market followed by Yahoo and MSN. So when I heard that some ex-Google employees have taken steps to create a search engine of there own I had to sit up and take notice.

The new search engine is called Cuil and presently boasts to be the search engine with the highest number of pages in their index…..over 120 billion and counting. The founders of Cuil include former Google employees Anna Patterson, Russell Power and Louis Monier. Patterson and Power worked on Google’s “TeraGoogle” search index and Monier specialized in search engine design. To further stand out from Google, Cuil is experinenting with a magazine style spread for their search results. With this style they have their search results presented within three columns on the webpage varying from the single-template, 10 result per page results that Google offers. Maybe with this style webmasters may have an equal opportunity to get their website links clicked once they show up on the first page. (Just maybe). Right now only testing will provide answers to the question of user responsiveness to the layout of the results page. Presently Google’s pages show greater clicks for the first 3 results on the page than any other, meaning a lot more traffic for showing up in the top 3 for a search term.

On a side-note, Google software engineers Jesse Alpert and Nissan Hajaj, in a blogpost on the official google blog http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2008/07/we-knew-web-was-big.html seemed to make pre-emptive comments related to Cuil’s insistence that they have the largest index for search engines on the web. They said that Google scanned more than a trillion webpages but didn’t index all of them because “many of them are similar to each other, or represent auto-generated content …. that isn’t very useful to searchers.” Google has only about 8.2 billion web pages in their index.

Another new search engine came into the fray this week. This one is based off the new search initiative that allows users to create their own search engine using Yahoo BOSS. It is called SearchCloud and it allows searchers to specify which keyword or keyword phrase is more important. The idea behind it is that with a weighting going to each search term the searcher includes, it will improve search relevance in relation to that specific user. However, it remains to be seen how well this user influenced search works in practice. Check out a review about the search engine from TechCrunch here: http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/07/28/searchcloud-weights-keywords-to-improve-search-relevance/

Check out a video on how to use SearchCloud here: