Portland, Oregon Businesses and SEO/SEM folks may be singing “Don’t be Cruil” to CUIL, a new search engine from some ex-Google engineers. At the time of this writing, a simple search on a subject that is popular both for recreation and business in Portland, came up with a dozen or so results that had, as far as we could tell, nothing to do with the topic. What we typed in: portland oregon beer. Our results ranged from several generic Citysearch links, to a site that, apparently, was a storage place for Portlanders to upload photos. As far as we can tell, CUIL didn’t really display any relevant links related to our search query for Portland, Oregon Businesses based on the usual SEO/SEM tools.

But there may be some logic behind this. The engineers may purposefully be trying a different approach than Google, in order to display results that are more relevant to the user and not the algorithm.

Here’s what CUIL has to say:

The Internet has grown exponentially in the last fifteen years but search engines have not kept up—until now. Cuil searches more pages on the Web than anyone else—three times as many as Google and ten times as many as Microsoft.

Rather than rely on superficial popularity metrics, Cuil searches for and ranks pages based on their content and relevance. When we find a page with your keywords, we stay on that page and analyze the rest of its content, its concepts, their inter-relationships and the page’s coherency.

Then we offer you helpful choices and suggestions until you find the page you want and that you know is out there. We believe that analyzing the Web rather than our users is a more useful approach, so we don’t collect data about you and your habits, lest we are tempted to peek. With Cuil, your search history is always private.

Cuil is an old Irish word for knowledge. For knowledge, ask Cuil.

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