Here’s something new on the Search front: cuil.com, a brand-new search engine developed by former Google Engineers.

According to CNN Money, former Google employee Anna Patterson’s last Internet search engine was so effective, Google bought it in 2004 to upgrade its own system. Now Patterson and her husband have launched cuil (pronounced “cool”), which aims to compete with the search juggernaut.

Google has dominated internet search so completely for so long it’s hard to imagine anyone challenging their monopoly. But many of us would love to see Search distributed more evenly amongst a number of companies. For that reason alone, any effort to challenge Google is worth cheering—

Any genuine competition is likely to improve existing Search performance (and Google, good as it is, is far from perfect). Perhaps more importantly, having one company dominate Search (as Google does) breeds a volatile and easily-abused (and abusive) system in which a businesses’ Google rankings can literally mean success or failure.

Best of luck, Cuil!

ps: please rank SierraDescents.com highly!!

This entry was posted on Monday, July 28th, 2008 at 9:56 am and is filed under Cool Sites, Technology. So There.