Knowinga

I like cuil, a new interesting kid on the block in the search engine arena.

• Interface: proper text summaries and the results include images (how do they select images?)
• Ranking: new and smart algorithm which analyses content instead of pagerank based on linking, so the bad link builders will not like cuil…
• The algoritm: my first thoughts: they use advanced grammatical analyses with special grammatics (not the one we learned at school) and did a lot of testing and human evaluation
• actualy as I write this… I read that one of the Cuil founders has worked for the WebFountain (IBM Research) project! This is very interesting, I worked with them in 2003 to prepare a pilot for my company; We were very impressed at that time but for a reason not to be disclosed we discontinued. I will try to find my notes and links and report more.
• Big question: what is their business model? I tried to find an answer but could not find it.

Based in the knowledge I have about WebFountain’s approaches, I am quite convinced that cuil can become a real competitor for Google.

By the way the cuil resuts in Dutch are rather good.

To be continued…..