With the recent failure of Microsoft to buy Yahoo, many hopes of bringing parity to the search marketing business appear to have disappeared. But wait…last week a never-heard-of company jumped in the search engine arena with some pretty bold announcements including one that claimed to be “better than Google.” Cuil founders said they had more pages than Google  indexed and their search algorithm did not rely on the well-known ranking tactics Google used. Instead, they relied exclusively on the content of a page to bring relevancy to the search. Furthermore, Cuil does not collect data from users like Google does. Thus, Cuil’s simple privacy statement tells you no information is taken from you. 

Of course, on the first day of Cuil’s unveiling, the system crashed and I was not able to use the search engine. While I hope Cuil recovers from the setback of its initial launch, I am somewhat concerned that people with such powerful credentials such as Cuil’s founders did not show the smarts they brag about on their website.

Back to the issue of Google’s dominance, I will be thrilled to see someone give Google real competition so we can all win.