You know what we need? Another search engine.  After all, there are only at last count 1,592 of them–make it an even 1,600.  Although most people would think the market’s saturated, that doesn’t stop others from trying, particularly is they have some experience to back up their challenge to Google, the undisputed sultan of search.

Experience like that of Anna Patterson, developer of the TeraGoogle indexing system still used by Google, and her husband, Tom Costello,  who created search engines at Stanford and IBM. If anyone could take on The Google, this pair could.

And so they must have thought when in July they launched Cuil. (It’s a Gaelic word meaning wisdom or knowlege, but, of course, you pronounce it “cool.”)  The concept behind it was that instead of  providing the most trafficked Web sites that match a user’s search–which was Google’s approach when it started off, lo, so many years ago–Cuil would rank results based on relavancy and content. It’s like if you chose the prom queen based on her SAT scores instead of her popularity. 

The concept certainly sounds good.  And at first Cuil (http://www.cuil.com) looked dangerous for Google. Its second day in the field, Cuil got a .25 percent share. Its servers were so flooded with search requests that some of them crashed.  

According to Hitwise, Cuil was beating Google in an important metric that measures relevancy of search results as determined by how long a user spends on a site it finds through a search engine.  During the last three days of July, Cuil’s users averages 9.65 minutes on a site. Google averages 9.37.

Since then, however, something happened. The ardor for Cuil cooled off to the point that Market Share by Net Applications reported it has slipped to practically zero market share, ” amidst massive criticism of Cuil’s search results, where reports of unrelated results to what was being searched were common.”

What happened? Who knows. Sometimes life can just be cruil.

Maxthon — Seize the Web!