I read an article today announcing a new search engine that was created by former Google employees.  One of the employees created the search engine (or at least some of it) that Google uses today.  The article stated they would be open for business today.  If your interested in using or just curious,  the web site is www.cuil.com  (it is pronounced cool.com)

It looks like it may have potential with a fresh new look for a search engine.  Complete with pictures, nice color scheme, etc.  However, I don’t think they are ready for mainstream or ready to compete with the other search engines.  Most of my searches ended in messages indicating the site was overloaded, or could not find any items.  Seems the longer my search phrase the less successful.  I also found the pictures don’t always match the web site.  I did a search for “greg and jennifer cruise planners” and found this web site with a picture of somebody I never met.  (maybe he is a Greg Becker?)  I found other websites with pictures that I could not locate on those websites.  I did find some creative picture links to sites (explains errors as well), such as when I did a search for DeSales (the university I attend), it found an article on wikipedia and had the universities “character U” logo next to it.  That logo does belong to the University, but it isn’t anywhere in the wikipedia article.

I searched for all my websites and had very little success, yet the boast they have the largest search database with over 12 billion sites indexed.  Seems like I could find some of my sites!  I didn’t find anywhere that allowed website submissions.  Not sure what their bot is named, but I will have to watch my website analysis tool to see if any bots from them crawl my site. (this means they have automated means of exploring websites – hence bots and crawl).

Overall, it may have potential with a fresh new look and associated pictures (if they get them right)  But, not only does Google not need to worry yet, but none of the others need to worry either.  I will keep an eye on them, maybe they will get the bugs worked out fast.  They must since major news agencies have reported them as being up and running.  All it takes is one bad visit to loose a potential client forever (or at least a long long time.)  So I do invite you to try it out, but don’t expect Google results just yet!