As the buzz has it, public website search engine Cuil is the new Google challenger. "Cuil" is apparently pronounced "cool", and "an old Irish word for knowledge".

The search engine was officially launched a few days ago and is enjoying its time in the spotlight. There's two reasons for that: the company was started by ex-Google employees; and it has an index that's supposed to be three times as large as Google's. Now, that's all very nice, but since CMS Watch doesn't evaluate the public search engines, but enterprise search tools ("behind the firewall search"), you may ask: what's the relevancy?

Well, the word is still out on Cuil's relevancy ranking -- or the freshness of its index, for that matter. One thing is certain: a larger index doesn't necessarily mean better results. The Cuil folks must have realized, though, that to be any kind of competition, your index has to be huge; it's the old numbers game that especially Yahoo! and Google used to engage in. Google was the first to quit playing that game, but somewhat "coincidentally" suddenly made a statement about their 1 trillion pages indexed.

As for how relevant this is for enterprise search: well, Cuil doesn't play that particular game (though many search companies do both or at least used to: Microsoft, FAST, Exalead, Vivisimo, the list goes on... and oh yes, Google). What struck me as most interesting is that Cuil attempts to change the way people don't just search, but find, by using an innovative new results interface. And that's always pretty good news... since so far, most vendors have rather unimaginatively been copying Google's design of search results, since that's what most users have grown used to on the web.

Of course, again, they're not the first to innovate: notable examples are the public search engines of Exalead (exalead.com) and Vivisimo. Both are quite experimental, and especially Exalead is continuously updating the interface. What you like best is rather personal, but for me, both are more useful than Cuil, where a static footer on the bottom takes up too much of my screen real estate: frames are soooo 1996 (even if they're not actual HTML frames). But Exalead and Vivisimo's public search engines are more interesting because they are not just marketing, but also ongoing research: what you see there might actually turn up in an enterprise search interface near you soon.

Still, if Cuil will get people used to more varieties than just plain vanilla Google behind the firewall, as well, that would be nice for anyone trying to implement search. I think many would be quite happy to have users clamor for something that's more like Cuil, rather than "why can't we just have Google". It's time to innovate the interfaces beyond just Googlesque results listings and Endeca's facets. That wouldn't just be old Irish knowledge, it would actually be pretty cool.