Cuil’s goals are to index the whole Web, to analyze deeply its pages and to organize results in a rich and helpful way that allows you to explore fully the subject of your search.
So we started from scratch—with a fresh approach, an entirely new architecture and breakthrough algorithms.
Our approach is to focus on the content of a page and then present a set of results that has both depth and breadth.
Our aim is to give you a wider range of more detailed results and the opportunity to explore more fully the different ideas behind your search. We think this approach is more useful to you than a simple list.
So Cuil searches the Web for pages with your keywords and then we analyze the rest of the text on those pages. This tells us that the same word has several different meanings in different contexts. Are you looking for jaguar the cat, the car or the operating system?
We sort out all those different contexts so that you don’t have to waste time rephrasing your query when you get the wrong result.
Different ideas are separated into tabs; we add images and roll-over definitions for each page and then make suggestions as to how you might refine your search. We use columns so you can see more results on one page.
We think that if you are interested in content rather than popularity, you’ll find our approach more useful.
You can install Cuil as your default search engine in Firefox, Internet Explorer and some other browsers. See these guides to install the plugin for Firefox, Flock, Google Chrome, Internet Explorer and Opera.
None. We analyze the Web, not our users. Read our Privacy Policy for details. It’s short.
Tom Costello, our founder and CEO, comes from Ireland, a country with a rich mythology around the quest for wisdom. Cuil is the Gaelic word for both knowledge and hazel, and features prominently in ancient legend. One famous story tells of a salmon that ate nine hazelnuts that had fallen into the Fountain of Wisdom and thereby gained all the knowledge in the world. Whoever ate the salmon would acquire this knowledge.
A famous poet fished for many years on the River Boyne hoping to catch the Salmon of Knowledge. When he finally caught it, he gave it to his young apprentice Finn McCuil to prepare, warning him not to eat any. As Finn cooked the salmon he burnt his thumb and instinctively sucked it to ease the pain. And so it was Finn and not the poet who gained all the wisdom of the world. Finn went on to become one of the great heroes of Irish folklore. Any time he needed to know the answer to a question, he sucked his thumb.
As a child Tom poached salmon from the same spot on the Boyne where it is said the Salmon of Knowledge was caught.
Twiceler is our Web crawler. Webmasters should go here for more information.
Please visit our Features section so that you can learn more about the ways Cuil can help your search.
We know from our research that people can make better and quicker decisions about relevance and quality when they can see an image from the website. We do our best to take images from Web pages that accurately reflect the content of the website. Many websites are full of images, so we use advanced algorithms to determine the best image to show the user.
It’s easier to read text when it’s in columns. That’s why publishers of densely written text like newspapers and family bibles use them. You can switch between using two and three columns by clicking on the link at the bottom of the results page.
Some people argue that many pages on the Internet are spam or porn. It’s true that during our Web crawl we have found and filtered those kinds of pages, but we’ve discovered that the number of them is quite small. It’s just that the makers of those pages use techniques to push them forward. We’ve also found quite a number of duplicate pages that we didn’t include in our index. So far, we have crawled 186 billion pages and have included 120 billion in our index. We continually index more pages.
We’ve found that a lot of Web pages have been designed with a small audience in mind—perhaps they are blogs or academic papers with specific interests or pages with family photos. We think that even though these pages aren’t necessarily for a wide audience, they contain content that one day you might need.
Our job is to index all these pages and examine their content for relevancy to your search. If they contain information you need, then they should be available to you.
Features like our category suggestions are a great way to encourage children to explore a subject on the Web. To protect them from adult oriented content we have added our Safe Search feature.
The first time you go to Cuil you will see that Safe Search is ON by default; you can double check by looking at the Safe Search indicator on the upper right hand corner directly below the Cuil logo 
. When Safe Search is on, Cuil filters out adult oriented search results, so adult oriented images and/or text should not be displayed. We can’t guarantee that adult content will not be displayed even when Safe Search is on; so we recommend that you always supervise your child when using an Internet connected computer, no matter what website they’re using.
Yes. Contact us here.
No. Cuil is a private company, with funding from these investors.
