distributedlife

In case you haven’t notice Cuil is the latest and greatest search engine to hit the shores of the intertubes. It seems to work very quickly and the three column layout for results is different. Not sure if its better as it can be difficult to identify the ranking. The images in the results is a great idea though.

However, rather than talking about the pros and cons of another search engine I thought I would look at it from two different angles. This post should be called, how to start rumours.

Cuil doesn’t search any domains that I own yet. Not sure why but they claim to index one hundred billion million trillion pages. To get your domain indexed you had to send them an email. I smell a trap. If you send them an email, they now have a valid email address (unless you send it from a temporary address). If they get enough email address for businesses or domain owners they could potentially produce an exciting amount of well targeted spam. Update: As I go to post this I notice they no longer have the mailto but a web form with optiona email address. I guess they are not spammers after all.

Still I have one more rumour to start…

I suggest that Cuil is really a facade created by Google. Google sets up Cuil as a rival search engine (most of the owners are ex-Google). Cuil tries and tries hard with some great search engine minds behind it. Two things occur. Cuil succeeds and Google buys it (or vice-versa) or the other scenario, Cuil fails. Cuil fails which helps fuel the opinion that as a search engine Google is unassailable. Consider this akin to a military junta establishing a fake insurgence and then crushing it to ensure the populace thinks twice before rebelling.

Note: All of this is unsubstantiated, but then shouldn’t all rumours be?