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Today marks the begining of search results for Cuil, pronounced “cool”, the new search effort created by ex-Google employees.

Taking some test runs on Cuil, it’s a nice search environment. A couple positives is that it lets you dig down into your results by giving you different categories that would apply to your search. This is something that Ask.com tends to do pretty well also.

Overall, it’s nice but it’s no Google. Perhaps it’s the constant pattern of using Google that has ingrained in my mind what search results are supposed to look like. But I’m not so sure that’s the case.

Along with the title link, there’s a much longer description shown with results that don’t appear in vertical format but rather a series of floated divs. There also is much more imagery with the results.

I believe that for research, Cuil looks like it could be a very useful tool. But for continual search? I’m not so sure.

That wouldn’t be because of a lack of search index though. Cuil’s search index spans 120 billion web pages. Cuil believes that’s at least three times the size of Google’s index, but who’s to know since Google stopped publicly talking about it’s index breadth when the catalog reach 8.2 billion pages three years ago.

If there’s something that would put Cuil over the top, it would be in content analysis. They aren’t trying to mimic Google’s method of ranking the quantity and quality of links to sites. Instead, Cuil’s technology is focused on drilling into the actual content of a page. The question that jumps to the front of my mind with this is… How easy is it going to be to gimmick the system? Part of what makes Google’s results relevant is exactly the method of ranking the quantity and quality of links to sites.

Technology aside, branding is going to be the biggest obstacle that Cuil will have to overcome if it has any hope of challenging Google for the top spot in search.

Google has become synonymous with search. Merriam-Webster even has an entry in the dictionary.

Cuil is definitely cool, and I will make some use of it. But it’s no Google.

I’m not sure if I’m late to the game or not here, so forgive me if so.  This morning I’ve been doing a bit of searching on Internet Security Suites.  My current subscription will expire soon and I really don’t want to use what I’ve been using.  Hint… It rhymes with a popular movie in the theaters now that starts with “Horton”.

I wanted to read up on BitDefender because I’ve heard that’s a somewhat light suite.  My current suite just seems to suck my resources dry at times and it’s not like I don’t have enough RAM.

As I did a search for BitDefender, of course it was the first site that showed up.  Of course beneath the listing was the usual breakdown of other pages in the site.  But underneath that was another search field that would allow me to search directly on bitdefender.com.

Anyone else noticed this?

Tags: google, google update

We all know that Google is the wildly popular search engine used by the majority of web users. But, where else do Internet users go to search the Web?

Nielsen/NetRatings ranks the top 10 search providers by the number of users and share of total searches for the month of July.