Kia's World

Certainly moderns society has gotten used to just throwing anything they need into the search engine titan Google. Society's addiction to the king of search engines has lead to the acceptance of the two word combo "Google It" as an actual verb in the english language. To be completely honest who really uses Yahoo!, Ask Jeeves, or any of the other hundreds of search engines out there? Personally, until yesterday, I myself was an avid Googler. Now, thanks to a decision made by a few witty individuals a new search engine has risen from the abiss of the internet with the aspiration to challenge mighty Google.

Meet Cuil (pronounced "cool"). The avid Googler would have to get used to the completely different, but intuitive, interface that Cuil employs for its searches. Cuil, like Google, employs a mathematical formula called a page rank that they (Cuil) claim delivers more relevant hits than Google's page rank formula. This is, however, debatable. Cuil does return far more results than Google does in a much more eye appealing format. When searching on Cuil the search bar (like that found on YouTube) gives you suggestions based on what you're typing. This feature makes typing go buy that much faster, something those who use the "hunt & peck" or "search & destroy" typing methods will happily thank Cuil for.

Cuil has two big claims to fame, claims that could turn this into a "David vs. Goliath" story. Cuil announced that their searchable index is currently at 120 billion web sites. Google completely refuses to give a strait answer as to how many web sites they have indexed, the estimate is at 30 to 50 billion. Naturally a Google Search and a Cuil Search will not turn up the same results, and not just because of the different page rank algorithms. With almost twice the indexed web sites to search Cuil is guaranteed to produce more hits. Cuil's second claim to fame is, very much unlike Google, it does not log your searches or sell your search patterns to companies for personal profit.

Cuil or Google? You make you're choice, personally I have college searches to do. I'll be "Cuiling It" this time…