I truly admire the efforts of Anna Patterson, the President and Founder of the coolest new search engine called Cuil.  What an incredibly smart woman and what’s more, what an incredibly ambitious woman to have taken on the search engine monolith, Google. Anna worked with Google for a number of years and is actually named on some of Google’s search patents. This experience provided her with invaluable insight into the holes in Google’s search engine platform so she has now gathered her own team to correct these inefficiencies by creating a completely new search platform. This search engine is called Cuil, pronounced more or less ‘cool.’ http://www.cuil.com/

Anna and her team at Cuil have attacked the problem of search and have approached it from a completely different angle than Google. How? A lot of users are unaware that Google only produces the top 1,000 most popular pages in any given search.  So, if you imagine a library of books (web pages) out there, Google’s search engine will only produce 1,000 of the most popular books.  The Cuil search engine however, scans all of the books in that library and establishes the context of the pages to assist the searcher with those deeper, more complex searches. The key is organization. Cuil has developed useful features to help the user in their search. You can find out more by visiting the url above and clicking on ‘About Cuil.‘

You are being watched! The other thing I like about Cuil is the anonymity. There is no such thing as user anonymity with Google. When you are searching on Google, your every movement is being tracked. This is a scary proposition for some, me included. I don’t like the fact that Google knows my preferences and what I’ve searched on in the past. I like anonymity on the web and the freedom that brings.  Google however defends its position by saying, ‘We aren’t tracking people, we’re tracking data.’ I don’t know if anyone else thinks this is bull but I sure do. Cuil strives for this goal of user anonymity:

“When you search with Cuil, we do not collect any personally identifiable information, period. We have no idea who sends queries: not by name, not by IP address, and not by cookie. Your search history is your business, not ours. We don’t need to keep logs of our users’ search activity, so we don’t.”

Give Cuil a look and add it to your browser of choice. Try it out for a week. Post some comments on your experience as I’d be curious about the feedback on this.