(You can read the article here.)

Last time, I offered a review about Cuil, an alternative search engine for Google maintained by ex-Googlers. It seems that their boast of 121,617,892,992 (as of now) indexed pages did not serve to lift them in the market.

As the article says, cuil has been more of a disaster than a success. Because of its “rigorous” promotion, it really has garnered a lot of attention until its launch on July, where it REALLY turned down a lot of people and investors. Just read the article for more details.

Also, the name of the company itself seems to have garnered a lot of attention. Cuil (pronounced as “cool”) is, according to the site, an Irish word meaning “knowledge.” But then, people at an Irish forum somewhat disagree. Yes, “cuil” is really an Irish word, but does not literally mean “knowledge.” (Read the column here.) Also, it has garnered a lot of criticism from investors, as the name is, in the first place, hard to pronounce, and second, the name also does not live up to its supposed-to-be reputation.

There are also an article that says cuil does not return links for common search queries, in spite of its large repository.

But then, for an icebreaker, here’s what really cuil looks like to me.

First, it made me glad when I saw the site at the first place, because of its simplicity and black background (which is my favorite color so far. I would really like to see Google’s main search engine page in black.). Searches were also displayed not in link format, but in thumbnail previews, which is an innovation, considering that all search engines today resort to only a listing of available links with some descriptive text above it. But then, the con of this is that if you are used to the link listing format used by most search engines, you are bound to get lost.

Also, I have tried the issue that cuil does not return common search queries. I tried searching the site with terms like “Philippines”, “Louisiana”, and “Firefox”, and it did return results. I guess they have fixed the issue already. After all, it has been more than two months seen the article was published.

But then, I think I might stick with Google for a while, or maybe Blackle. I think Cuil has still a long way to go, and with the issues that had arisen with its debut, I think the company is really doing its best to fix things. Well, if they really want to expel Google out of the search business (which is one of their goals in mind), they should all work 24-7 in order to reach that goal. They must keep in mind that Google holds 63% of the market, and displacing them is like air-lifting the statue of liberty from Liberty Island to Iraq.

P.S. I have tried to search “thegenuisishere” in cuil, which returns two pages of reults (as of this writing) from Google. Sadly, cuil’s response was: “

No results were found for: thegenuisishere

If you’ve checked your spelling, you could try using fewer or different keywords to broaden your search.”

The company does offer a link to report the problem to them, but then, with two pages of results from Google and 121,617,892,992 of indexed pages, isn’t that a bit of overkill to Cuil?

Consequently, I have moved my review of cuil from this blog to here.

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