A new search engine was launched yesterday with hype of rivaling Google. Ha.

Ya, you heard it right. Cuil (pronounced “cool”) hopes to rival Google and they’re getting a lot of press for it. They boast an index of 120 billion web pages, supposedly 3-times more than any other search engine. Its claim to innovation is its keyword relevance and analysis-based searching rather than page rank popularity search (such as Google). Cuil’s site states that while page rank popularity is important, it is dominating search results so heavily that what you’re looking for is getting harder to find.

I beg to differ. I wanted to learn a bit more about Cuil so I searched “Cuil” on their site and got this. That’s not what I was looking for.

Ok – it has a benefit. Because Cuil analyzes web pages rather than click throughs, it doesn’t keep any of your past search history. It’s “not our business” they say. Privacy is important, so I appreciate that. But let’s be real, are we ever going to break ourselves of our Google habits? Will “Cuil” ever become a verb? What’s popular is a backbone to our society – we loooove what’s popular. In marketing, we look for trends and if we weren’t lucky enough to have created them, we follow them. We need Google.

Cuil makes it hard to find what I’m looking for, hard to figure out what’s important (and popular) and hard to figure out how to get my clients to the top. So for now, it’s nothing more than a challenge…and a sneaky search tool for things you don’t want people to know about….

BTW – According to their website, Cuil is an old Irish word for “knowledge.” By “old Irish” they meant Gaelic. Just as Mexicans don’t speak Mexican, Irishmen don’t speak Irish. I know, I searched it on Google.