Cuil

Thanks, as usual when it comes to geek stuff, to the usual Italian gent.

There's a new search engine in town. It's called Cuil, pronounced 'cool' after the Irish folk hero Fionn mac Cumhaill or if you're American, apparently, Finn Mac Cuill. Fionn gained all the knowledge of the world by sucking his thumb. It's complicated and involves a salmon.

There are some potentially cuil things about cool, including the fact that its results aren't simply link based (ie: it doesn't rank sites higher just because they've got more links to them) but also promise to be more contextually relevant. Search results are categorised where relevant, which means if you search for 'Dubai', you get tabs which include Dubai Hotels, Jobs in Dubai and Dubai Airport. They missed tabs for 'Dubai Traffic and Dubai Rent' but it's already looking like a pretty different approach. Y0u also get a pretty smart drop down menu of categories, including one on 'neighbourhoods of Dubai'.

It's brave enough. I'm old enough to remember a world before the Yahoo! Google duopoly: Alta Vista, Lycos, Webcrawler and a million other search engines once jostled for our attention and our searches. Cuil offers, for the first time in years, something different and an alternative to the leviathan. Only time will tell whether it's going to work out a winner. But for now, take a tootle along and check it out before the servers break - everyone's talking about the Cuil new kid on the block and their servers are already creaking under the strain of all that buzz...