Current Events . TechnologyOn July 30, 2008 by Adam

It seems like these days competitors to Google are coming out of the woodwork. A while back, I introduced Powerset, who is now a property of Microsoft. Powerset is bringing back the concept of synaptic search, while a new search engine, Viewzi is focusing on a different concept. Viewzi brings search to new light with different views.

While Powerset and Viewzi are good search alternatives to Google, so is Ask, Live search, Yahoo! and AltaVista… The one who I think may ultimately pose a threat to the Google giant is a new search called Cuil (pronounced cool). Cuil boasts a page index in the billions while Google is in the millions. This may just be hot air; however, Cuil searches by page contextual relevance. While Powerset is searching page synaptic, and Google is searching keywords, Cuil is searching the page content. What makes this so different from Google is page rank. Think of those days back in gym class, it was a popularity contest when it came to choosing teams. This is similar to how Google ranks its pages, the more links, the more popular, the higher in the search results.

Cuil has it easier than PowerSet. Synaptic search is a complicated task while searching for the contents of the page are much easier. The other Thing that makes Cuil a viable alternative to Google is who developed it, Tom Costello, a Stanford professor, and Anna Patterson, Google’s search developer. The one thing that I want to know, is why hasn’t anyone come up with a good alternative sooner?