Ain't it Cuil?

But is it news? Jennie Kermode looks at the launch of the new search engine hoping to rival Google.

It was launched on July 27, but you could be forgiven for not noticing, as it went down just a few hours later and could reportedly never be accessed at all in some parts of the UK. Announced as the search engine destined to replace Google, Cuil is the brainchild of three former Google employees: Anna Patterson, her husband Tom Costello, and search indexer Russell Power. So what makes them think that - especially after a start like this - their search engine can succeed where others have failed?

Every Cuil review I've seen so far has felt the need to explain how it should be pronounced ('cool'). This kind of thing never speaks well of the marketing savvy behind a product, and it should perhaps have been taken as an indication of the problems which were to follow. Because running a successful search engine is all about understanding marketing. SEM in particular. Cuil has a new method of approaching this - where other search engines use algorithms based on keyword frequency and popularity to order results, Cuil analyses every indexed page contextually in an attempt to optimize relevance. But does it work?

Results are mixed, with the average Cuil review suggesting that it will need to do better before it can compete with the big boys. Contextual searching is all very well, but Cuil seems to run into problems quickly if a word is misspelled, and it's bad at looking for phrases - type in the name of a particular website, in quotation marks, and it'll still throw up irrelevant results with those individual words in them first. This can make it a poor choice of search engine if you know what you want and would like to go directly there. On the other hand, it provides query suggestion box which may be helpful if you're less sure what you're looking for or if you're just surfing for fun.

If Cuil has one big advantage to the average user, it's that it's less friendly to the SEM experts out there promoting their own sites - you won't find the first two pages of your search full of irrelevant commercial offers. But this is surely the case only because it's new. It can only be a matter of time before SEM methods are developed to suit its searching style. SEM experts have been encouraging webmasters to concentrate on producing solid content for some time now - all this new search engine approach will do is to speed that process up.

It shouldn't be difficult to optimize your website for Cuil. All you'll need to do is to concentrate on subject-focused content instead of lists, making it friendly to the new search engine's subject-based indexing system. The real question is whether or not it will be worth the effort when 82 percent of the search engine market still belongs to Google - and when there are few real indications that that's likely to change.