Cuil.com is the latest search engine to hit the market, and sets sail to compete with Google itself.
The new search engine is run by former Google employees, and has already provided its first traffic to this very blog, see the domain entry in my stats which showed up earlier today:
New referrer entry from cuil.com
Along with a bigger index (they claim 120 billion pages) against Googles roughly 40 billion indexed pages, there are several other advantages to the new search engine. The results are not displayed in the classical Google fashion, but rather in several columns along with bigger text snippets than Google provides.
A search for my name shows up like so:
Cuil.com search for Lars Koudal
Another feature is the seemlingly semi-intelligent search engine, which attempts to group your search results and sort them into categories.
It is gonna be very interesting to see how Cuil.com is gonna do in competition with Google, especially from a SEO perspective. If they can generate enough traffic by ranking highly, the ballgame might change completely, so you need to optimize your sites for not only Google anymore, but Cuil.com as well.
Personally, I don’t know how well they are gonna do, the search results display very slowly, but it might be worth it for the better and nicer layout, and it might also just be an initial traffic spike.
