For those of you who are not yet familiar with Cuil, it is the latest contender for the Google throne. Cuil is a new search engine developed by a team of ex-Google personnel.

Cuil (pronounced Cool) claims to be the world’s biggest search engine. That may sound like fluff and probably is. They claim to search three times as many pages as Google, but their search results are currently very limited and do not yet reflect their idealistic goals.

Cuil openly states their philosophy, which theoretically reflects the goals of their ranking algorithms. If they can walk the walk and not just talk the talk, there may be merit in this new company. But that is yet to be seen.

1. Size Matters Cuil claims to retain more data, even that of lesser importance to most users. At the moment, that is not reflected in their search results because searches for long-tail keywords (those used less often) frequently produce no results.
2. Popularity is useful, but not always important Unlike Google, Cuil says that they rank pages based upon relevancy, rather than popularity. Google’s ranking algorithms give preference to large sites with a lot of inbound links.
3. Organization is fundamental Cuil claims to categorize information differently and will display it in a more useful way.
4. Cuil analyzes the Web, not its users We like this one because they aim to respect the privacy of Web users. The amount of data that Google tries to collect and coordinate is sometimes a bit scary.

Not everyone is enamored with Cuil’s current performance. John Dvorak at PC Magazine is certainly not a fan.

Cuil is currently getting a lot of publicity, mostly because of the nature of their team, which is made up of ex-Google personnel who do know about search engines. Only time will tell if they will become a serious contender for Google’s top position in the search world. Google is the 800 pound gorilla. It will take a 900 pound gorilla to beat them, not a 50 pound chimpanzee.