Hi.  Is there a way to change the default search engine, google, to another 
search engine?  I want to use Cuil for a while.  It was developed by the same 
lady that developed Google search engine.  Only I don't know how to change the 
default search engine.  Is it changeable?  

See news artlcle and link to news article.

Cuil Challenges Google With Privacy 
http://www.informationweek.com/news/internet/search/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=209602251

Founded by husband-and-wife team Tom Costello and Anna Patterson, Cuil aims to 
rank the relevancy search results by content analysis rather than by popularity.
By Thomas Claburn 
InformationWeek 
July 28, 2008 03:50 PM 
Cuil, a new search engine, opened for business on Monday, boasting an index of 
120 billion Web pages, "three times more than any other search engine."
Google (NSDQ: GOOG), as if pre-briefed on today's announcement, on Friday said 
that its index had reached 1 trillion URLs, though not all of them lead to 
unique Web pages.

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Any Certification Exam Founded by husband-and-wife team Tom Costello and Anna 
Patterson, a search-engine researcher from Stanford University and a Google 
technical lead, respectively, Cuil aims to rank the relevance of search results 
by content analysis rather than by popularity. It's an obvious swipe at Google, 
which treats Web links as popular votes in weighing Web page relevance for a 
given query.
"Our team approaches search differently," said Patterson, president and COO of 
Cuil, in a statement. "By leveraging our expertise in search architecture and 
relevance methods, we've built a more efficient yet richer search engine from 
the ground up. The Internet has grown and we think it's time search did, too."

For Cuil, pronounced "Cool" rather than "Quill," there's a separation between 
search and surveillance. Whereas Google records information about its users and 
their searches to improve the user experience and to deliver more relevant 
search results and ads, Cuil remembers nothing.

Cuil's privacy policy actually promises privacy: "When you search with Cuil, we 
do not collect any personally identifiable information, period. We have no idea 
who sends queries: not by name, not by IP address, and not by cookies (more on 
this later). Your search history is your business, not ours."

Cuil is not the first search engine to offer search privacy; Ixquick has done 
so since June 2006. Ixquick, as a metasearch engine, gets results from other 
search engines. Cuil, however, offers new search technology and a column-based 
search results interface.

It remains to be seen whether computer users care about privacy enough to alter 
their search habits.

In terms of performance, Cuil is responsive and looks good, at least when the 
service is up. The search startup was down at least twice on Monday. "Due to 
overwhelming interest, our Cuil servers are running a bit hot right now," a 
Cuil error message said just before noon Pacific time on Monday. "The search 
engine is momentarily unavailable as we add more capacity."

But Cuil leaves something to be desired in terms of the relevance of the images 
it places beside search results. "We do our best to take images from Web pages 
that accurately reflect the content of the Web site," Cuil's FAQs document 
explains. "Many Web sites are full of images, so we use advanced algorithms to 
determine the best image to show the user."

Advanced though they may be, Cuil's algorithms aren't yet accurate when it 
comes to placing images with links to related content. An ego-search for my 
name, for example, used a CNNMoney.com graphic to link to a blog that published 
a review of a book I wrote.

Google News has had similar issues, associating unrelated text and images. But 
such inaccuracies seem to be increasingly rare.

Though Cuil may aspire to challenge Google, it has some basic service and 
accuracy issues to deal with first. After that, it can join Exalead, Hakia, 
Mahalo, Powerset, and Wikia in their quests to challenge the big-league search 
engines. 


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