Over the past few days, the blogosphere has been, well, blogging, about a new search engine developed by a couple ex-Google employees. Known as “Cuil,” which is apparently a Gaelic word for “Knowledge,” the search engine is attempting to be “the next Google.” (Side note: In case you didn’t know, it’s pronounced “Cool,” not “Quill.”)

I think the site has potential, if they put some serious work into it, but I don’t think they’ll be able to topple Google from their high throne. Google is, and probably will always be, the king of the serch engines. No other search site has become a synonym for “search.” No other search site has ever become a common colloquial verb. (Have you ever heard someone say “I Yahoo-ed it to see what it meant”?) Then you have the Google muscle memory, where you automatically type “Google.com” when you need to search something, the tight integration in Firefox, and all the other services in the Google empire (I’m so used to GMail/Google Apps I can baarely stand “normal” mail clients). And that’s leaving out the fact that I’ve never found a search engine that works as well. Cuil may one day become a major player, but it’s not going to take on Google.

Cuil has an innovative new interface, featuring three columns of search result blocks, which seems to be an effective way to display results, and “related” images are displayed alongside the results. They also have tabs along the top, which are supposed to lead to results in similar topics, and there is also a “drill-down” box to help you refine your query.

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