Cuil - pronounced “cool” - launched yesterday, developed by some ex-Googlers. I’m not entirely sure why you’d try to compete with Google - a name that is absolutely synonymous with search - but the company has $33m of venture capital behind it, so someone has faith in its model.

I had a little play with it this morning. The homepage design is nice and clean, and I really like the layout of the search results, which provide the user with more than the usual two-line Google excerpt from the site in question. My (very unscientific) research showed similar results to Google: “Berkeley PR” brought up our website in the top spot on both Google and Cuil; and we come up on the first page for “public relations” on both engines. “Technology PR” puts Berkeley on the first page on Cuil, but not on Google. Not sure where Cuil gets its graphics from though; the picture on the FreeIndex link is absolutely nothing to do with us.

It’ll be interesting to see whether Cuil develops its offering as Google has done through its analytics, maps, calendars and a plethora of other cuil - sorry - cool applications.

Incidentally, if you put “cuil” into Google, this is the first result. Funny that…

Jo Jamieson