Last week came alive a new search engine called Cuil, Founded for some ex Google members. The new kid on the block hadn’t a good start up, the servers went down the first day because a high traffic demand. And people still doesn’t know how to pronounce the name. In Cuil’s proper words they say the name is pronounced “Cool”.

HitWise, an Internet leader in online competitive intelligence revealed the first data for Cuil search engine. Here are some interesting initial numbers of the market share of visits in the U.S.

HitWise:
“One of the advantages of our massive 10 million U.S. Internet users sample, is that we can report on daily market share percentages in a very timely manner. According to our daily rankings data for July 28th 2008, Cuil premiered a 106 position of all Internet sites, and a 10 th position for the Search Engines Category with a 0.6% of visits to all search engines this first Monday. While these opening day stats are impressive, on Tuesday, Cuil slipped to the 12 th position among the search engines and 197 th for all sites.

Another interesting fact is that, on Monday Cuil received 34.6% of its traffic from the search engines (25.7% came from Google) and 26.8% came from News & Media category indicating that news coverage of Cuil launch was successful in driving launch day traffic for the new search engine.”

Alexa also shows another interesting Cuil traffic data from around the world.

By now, the new search engine seems to be an unknown alien in the large Spanish community, only Spain has a little significant traffic data.

Germany takes the second place in visitors from around the world, I expected more visitors from Japan, by now they are far way in 9th place.

Cuil claim to be the “world’s biggest search engine”, so I suppose that they have the biggest database of webpages.

They show the next data in their webpage “Search 121,617,892,992 web pages“. I made a little search test with the next popular KeyWords: Britney Spears, Brad Pitt & YouTube.

Here are the results from Google, Yahoo & Cuil see for Yourself the result in numbers. Cuil practically fails in all terms to shows the largest SERP’s.

Youtube
Cuil 173,211,665
Google 1,250,000,000
Yahoo 1,270,000,000

Brad Pitt
Yahoo 75,100,000
Google 23,600,000
Cuil 9,745,433

Britney Spears
Yahoo 215,000,000
Google 107,000,000
Cuil 136,397,691

This info appears in Cuil website.

Cuil Philosophy in their proper words.
The Internet is getting bigger and more disorganized every day. Cuil’s goal is to solve the two great problems of search: how to index the whole Internet—not just part of it—and how to analyze and sort out its pages so you get relevant results.

What does the name Cuil mean?
Tom Costello, founder and CEO, is from Ireland, a country with a rich mythology around the quest for wisdom. Cuil is the Gaelic word for both knowledge and hazel and features prominently in ancient legend. One famous story tells of a salmon that ate nine hazelnuts that had fallen into the Fountain of Wisdom and thereby gained all the knowledge in the world. Whoever ate the salmon would acquire this knowledge. A famous poet fished for many years on the River Boyne hoping to catch the Salmon of Knowledge. When he finally caught it, he gave it to his young apprentice Finn McCuil to prepare, warning him not to eat any. As Finn cooked the salmon he burnt his thumb and instinctively sucked it to ease the pain. And so it was Finn and not the poet who gained all the wisdom of the world




Images beside the results. How do the pictures are selected?
We know from our research that people can make better and quicker decisions about relevance and quality when they can see an image from the website. We do our best to take images from Web pages that accurately reflect the content of the website. Many websites are full of images, so we use advanced algorithms to determine the best image to show the user.

This concept about the images is one of the errors that I noticed, Images do not correspond in many cases to the shown webpage, where are they coming from?

All search engines show their results in the same way, Cuil try to innovate and try to change the rules. They show results in columns and implement different ways to show results using roll down menus and some kind of tagging.

Domain history in the way back machine. Something that I noticed, is the weird past of the Cuil Domain, it was initially registered in July 30, 2001 and had this look.

The www.cuil.com website is currently being completed as a local portal directory of Health-Club.net the ultimate guide to local neighbourhood gyms, aerobics, fitness, physique and health clubs for the UK National Directory

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Then in March 21, 2007, the domain name was for sale. Take a look.

The domain name www.cuil.com is for sale. Prices in the region of US $ 4,250 Get On The Web Limited registered for its own websites, portals and client projects a number of generic domain names (including this one) some years ago, which are now no longer required. We are considering selling this domain name alone, or the domain name plus partially-developed website. If you are interested in this domain name please complete this offer form.

The domain name was in this way until Mar 21, 2007, date that I suppose Cuil was acquired for the current Owner. Tom Costello.

Let’s see how this new search engine performs. It’s too soon to define Cuil search engine performance. What will make different to the new Cuil, Have you try it?