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Tech View
John Agsalud
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It’s ‘cuil’ there will be another search engine
Recent headlines have hailed the announcement of
cuil.com, a brand new search engine to compete with the 800 lb gorilla that is
Google.
Developed by ex-Google employees whose non-compete agreements have presumably expired, cuil portends to be next great search engine.
The announcement, however, begs the question, "Do we really need a new search engine?"
Actually, this question has been asked many times before and each time it's been answered in the affirmative. The first search engines were rudimentary tools, beginning with "archie" which is an abbreviation for "archives." Archie was basically a database of filenames that were matched against user queries. The cleverly named Veronica and Jughead soon followed, which were just as rudimentary and, as we like to say, "expert friendly."
Webcrawler was the first modern search engine for the world wide web and became popular in the mid-'90s. Webcrawler uses a method still employed by many search engines in that it programmatically surfs the 'net and indexes key words on Web pages.
Soon, there were a veritable plethora of search engines.
Yahoo was probably the most popular, with Altavista, Lycos, Excite and others in wide use. Technically, Yahoo was not initially a search engine. Rather, it was a Web directory. The key distinction is that a Web directory is a collection of categorized links that are usually submitted by site owners and maintained and edited with lots of human intervention. Bowing to advances in search technology, Yahoo switched to crawler technology in late 2002.
Of course, Google is the most widely used search engine today. You know you've made it when your brand name turns into a verb, such as Xerox or Rollerblade.
Why is Google so popular? When it first came out, it touted itself as the fastest, most technically advanced search engine. Sound familiar? Google was able to build itself up into critical mass by being technologically advanced. Google's search technology is based on a patented system called PageRank, which basically measures the popularity of Web pages with any given search phrase.
Google continues to gain even further momentum with new functions, such as image searching and maps. Online applications aren't far behind.
Cuil touts its search engine as ranking pages based on "content and relevance" rather than popularity. Is this better than Google? Only time will tell.
It is important to remember that when Google first came out, folks asked the same question, "Do we really need a new search engine?" After all, the existing search engines seemed to be doing the job.
Hindsight tells us, yes, we really did need Google. Certainly, this is not to say that cuil is the next dominant player. New technologies, however, should not be summarily dismissed just because we think we don't need them.
John Agsalud is president of ISDI Technologies Inc., based in Honolulu. He can be reached at
jagsalud@isdi-hi.com