Cyprus-Forum.com

[laptachap]

I have just spotted this ............

Have you tried it yet ?

What do you think ??

http://www.cuil.com

Cuil, pronounced "cool." Backed by $33 million in venture capital, the search engine plans to begin processing requests for the first time Monday.

Cuil had kept a low profile while Patterson, her husband, Tom Costello, and two other former Google engineers -- Russell Power and Louis Monier -- searched for better ways to search. Now, it's boasting time. What do you think of the new Cuil search engine?

For starters, Cuil's search index spans 120 billion Web pages.

Patterson believes that's at least three times the size of Google's index, although there is no way to know for certain. Google stopped publicly quantifying its index's breadth nearly three years ago when the catalog spanned 8.2 billion Web pages.

Cuil won't divulge the formula it has developed to cover a wider swath of the Web with far fewer computers than Google. And Google isn't ceding the point: Spokeswoman Katie Watson said her company still believes its index is the largest.

After getting inquiries about Cuil, Google asserted on its blog Friday that it regularly scans through 1 trillion unique Web links. But Google said it doesn't index them all because they either point to similar content or would diminish the quality of its search results in some other way. The posting didn't quantify the size of Google's index.
A search index's scope is important because information, pictures and content can't be found unless they're stored in a database. But Cuil believes it will outshine Google in several other ways, including its method for identifying and displaying pertinent results.

Rather than trying to mimic Google's method of ranking the quantity and quality of links to Web sites, Patterson says Cuil's technology drills into the actual content of a page. And Cuil's results will be presented in a more magazine-like format instead of just a vertical stack of Web links. Cuil's results are displayed with more photos spread horizontally across the page and include sidebars that can be clicked on to learn more about topics related to the original search request.

Finally, Cuil is hoping to attract traffic by promising not to retain information about its users' search histories or surfing patterns -- something that Google does, much to the consternation of privacy watchdogs.

Cuil is just the latest in a long line of Google challengers.

The list includes swaggering startups like Teoma (whose technology became the backbone of Ask.com), Vivisimo, Snap, Mahalo and, most recently, Powerset, which was acquired by Microsoft Corp. this month.

Even after investing hundreds of millions of dollars on search, both Microsoft and Yahoo Inc. have been losing ground to Google. Through May, Google held a 62 percent share of the U.S. search market followed by Yahoo at 21 percent and Microsoft at 8.5 percent, according to comScore Inc.

Google has become so synonymous with Internet search that it may no longer matter how good Cuil or any other challenger is, said Gartner Inc. analyst Allen Weiner

[Sotos]

They are not google rival. They are dreaming. First lets see if they can rival yahoo and msn and then we can talk about Google!

[Nikitas]

Google cannot compare to Yahoo. Easy to prove. The system tries to out think the user and that sucks. If you access from Greece, typing clearly google.com you get autoreferral to Google Greece. Talk about presumption and not realising that they are in the global village and all that!

[Tim Drayton]

Google cannot compare to Yahoo. Easy to prove. The system tries to out think the user and that sucks. If you access from Greece, typing clearly google.com you get autoreferral to Google Greece. Talk about presumption and not realising that they are in the global village and all that!

Try typing "www.google.com" in the address bar on a computer in Libya, and you are automatically directed to Google Libya. This is obviously because Gaddafi and his gang wish to vet what people are able to access. I think Google has the same kind of deal with China - the country permits them to operate there provided people are only able to access a version of the search engine that the authorities can censor. But in a democratic, EU-member country like Greece - this is odd.

[cyprusgrump]

There is nothing sinister about it IMHO.

Both Google and Yahoo try to work out where you are and direct you to the appropriate site.

Our satellite system links to the Internet through our Network Operations centre (NOC) in Germany so google and Yahoo re-direct you to the German site automatically if you type in the ‘com’ address…

Other sites do this too – one of our customers was upset because while searching for a new girlfriend all the ‘hits’ that met his requirements were based in Germany…

[Tim Drayton]

There may be nothing sinister about it in most parts of the world.

I have just tried entering "www.google.com", "www.google.gr" and "www.google.com.ly" into my address bar and in each case here in Cyprus have been directed to the version of Google that I requested.

I can assure you that if you did the same in Libya, you would be automatically directed to "www.google.com.ly" regardless of the extension you entered. You cannot access "www.google.com" from that country - or if you can, I have never found how, and I speak as one who has tried. Libya is a country with one of the strictest censorship regimes in the world. Whether or not that is sinister is for you to decide.

[Nikitas]

It is not the sinister aspect that gets me. It is the bothersome aspect, having to choose yet again the original choice. It is presumptuousness of perhaps lack of culture displayed by the geek designers. They cannot figure out that there are English speakers in another country or travellers who may be there temporarily and really do want to look up the .com address and not the .gr.