Cuil.. how?
Friday, August 1st, 2008I first saw something about Cuil on a post on a friend’s facebook profile and I was wondering to myself how long this search engine had been running. In any case I ignored it; but just today I opened up my feed reader and found an article talking about how Cuil is reliving the days when the internet bubble was booming! So I started to read up more on it and I have to say so far it is appealing to me.. I even vanity cuil’ed myself. :) There are two things that piqued my interest.
1. The people working at Cuil…
More specifically, the President. Ms. Anna Patterson.. mother of four, PhD computer science graduate who programmed a search engine when she was having a particularly difficult pregnancy. Fascinating when you think that this is the story behind some of the technology that we are using daily.
Besides her, there are a host of other people who have CVs all tied to heavy brands.
2. Their privacy policy.
When you get to the very bare home page of Cuil, there are seven elements. Logo, search button, search text box, number of indexed pages, a link to information about the company, copyright information and a link to information about their privacy policy. Seems that this is their edge. They claim not to store logs of searches done and/or information from cookies. Considering that google is EVERYWHERE today, and storing logs about searches as well as cookies (apparently the google cookie was previously set to expire in 2038), this sounds like a good idea for people who are concerned about how the trail of information that they leave behind gets used. “Maybe I want to stand for president one day and Google logs shall show that I was doing searches on how to make weapons of mass destruction!” (actually this very sentence shall probably get indexed and have a few hits on Google!)
On my side I get more and more cynical everyday about how much privacy we really have. I hear from people who do not want to put their profiles online, share pictures, and not to have their name appear on the internet. To me it is all about perceived privacy. We carry around mobile phones and send SMS everyday and search on Google. Basically we leave a trail everywhere regardless. So unless you are going to completely shun the “digital world” then it seems pointless to be overly concerned about privacy.
In the final analysis, I would agree with the quote from Danny Sullivan that if the search engine turns up relevant results they shall become popular. Maybe the management at Cuil needs to sponsor Google anonymous meetings as well.. get people to kick the habit!