Let’s take the high road here and welcome competition which makes us all do better. Even Google granted that competitors keep them on their technological toes:

Having great competitors is a huge benefit to us and everyone in the search space. It makes us all work harder, and at the end of the day our users benefit from that.

So said Google spokesperson Katie Watson. (Of course, when you dominate 62% of the U.S. search market, as Google does, you’d better be magnanimous.)

Using the competitor mantra of what makes us all stronger, why don’t we look behind the points and counterpoints to glimpse what niche search marking needs new kid Cuil might be serving.

·   More Content Focused? Cuil’s search technology drills into actual content of a page, rather than score and rank quality and quantity of the web site’s links … a la Google. And Cuil plans to be more eye-friendly in the way it displays those content-focused search results: It will display more photos, more informational sidebars on the searched topic and more of a magazine-style search results page. Instead of a vertical stack of text and links.

·   Scooping a Wider Search Swath? Cuil’s search index supposedly spans 120 Billion web pages, a total web index that insiders guess is three times Google’s index. There is no way for us outsiders to verify either index size, because Google stopped publicly showing its index muscle when it hit a “mere” 8.2 Billion web pages in 2005. And Cuil, course, will not release its proprietary formulas for crawling through such a wide swath of the www. So, if we take neither Cuil nor Google at their public word, maybe we can glean useful info from the history of this new start-up’s creators.

·   The Past is the Future?  Not to go all existential here, but we might guess where this new search start-up is going by looking at where its four ex-Google employees have been … besides working for Google.  Anna Patterson joined Google in 2004 after Google bought her search technology called Recall, which indexed old web sites for the Internet Archive. Patterson left in 2006 to work on a better search “mousetrap.” Louis Monier worked for Google for a short time, but he’s better known as the former CTO of AltaVista. (For young blog readers out there, AltaVista was the go-to business search engine in the 1990s … before Google was born in 1998.) Oh, Monier also worked on the search engine for eBay’s auction site. Russell Power, now of Cuil, was a former Google engineer. And the fourth member of the new kid start-up team is Tom Costello, who built a search engine called Xift in the late 1990s, then worked on IBM’s analytic engine called WebFountain, before joining Google briefly as an engineer.

There is always room in the changing search universe for a newer, better or differently focused engine. At least that’s what Top Ten Wholesale bet on five years ago when it saw wholesale and B2B needs not being met by the big engines. Cuil’s Anna Patterson said of the need for new search engines:

Google has looked pretty much the same for 10 years now, and I can guarantee it will look the same a year from now.

Let’s wait and see what The Kid can do before we exclude it from the kickball team.