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I do believe that becoming a Google competitor is definitely one of the most difficult challenges for new startups these days. The story could be different if the potential competitor has been developed and founded by former Google employees.

Mr. Costello, a former researcher at Stanford, said that with 120 billion Web pages, Cuil’s search index is larger than any other. The company uses a form of data mining to group Web pages by content, which makes the search engine more efficient, he said. Instead of showing results as short snippets of text and images with links, it displays longer entries and uses more pictures. It also provides tools to help users further refine their queries.

Cuil , pronounced “Cool”, unveiled today, seems to be promising, even if you need to get accostumed with an interface which is much different from Google or Yahoo.

Searches lead to a table of results where you can find a summary about the results itself. The following is the results table for “voip“

Unfortunately I found out that there is still much work to be done. For example, If I search for my name “luca filigheddu”, that leads to 20.500 results on Google, with my blog on top, this page comes out:

I made other tries and I have to say I’m not impressed at this time. Ok, it’s just the first day, so I’ll give it more time. By the way, the service is down right now:

Do you think there could be a service that can compete with Google, while other more consolidated and historical services like Yahoo, Altavista or Microsoft Live Search are still struggling to keep a decent market share ?

UPDATE: I noticed Duncan Riley pointed out the same issues

Technorati Tags: cuil, Google, luca filigheddu, search engine