geekEleet

When Anna Patterson created her last Internet search engine in 2004, it was so good that Google promptly bought the technology and incorporated it into their own system.  Now, four years later, Anna is at it again.  She believes that she has designed and built an even better search engine - only this one isn’t for sale.  Enter Cuil.com

Rather than living off the small fortune that the new search engine design could pull in if placed on the open market, Anna intends to upstage Google and create a better way of life for web surfers all around the globe.  The first claim de fame for the new site is a 120 billion page index.  While there are no current numbers on Google’s index size, the last reported information from three years ago showed the search giants catalog sitting at 8.2 billion web pages.

Google doesn’t seem phased by this new competitor though.  Personally, I don’t think they should be.  While Cuil.com may offer a nicer looking search page, it just doesn’t deliver.  Even with $33 million in venture capital, the startup is unable to handle the current load of users.  Messages range from “No results found” to “This page cannot be displayed”.  Between failures, while I could get some results, the majority were bogus links that took me to very irrelevant pages.  More frustrating was the fact that the Cuil engine told me that it had discovered 64 results, however it only displayed 7 of them and there were no additional pages to see more results.

As much as I hope this engine gets better, they are off to a rocky start.  I imagine that many users will never go back to the site after the poor experience this morning.  It always pays to estimate your user load on the high side, you never know when your story might break national news.