The world's first 'cuil' dog!

KUT.org, Austin, Texas, streamed a review of "I Google Myself" — a theater show about ego surfing. The show's google-crazy character finds someone else with the same name and becomes obsessed with him.

Dogs never get virtually obsessed via canine-computer interaction. We have to smell something to get hooked.

Nonetheless, at around 11:30 P.M. on July 27, 2008, I became the world's first dog to cuil AND also the world's first dog to be cuiled when I searched Cuil.com for myself, Tilin corgi.

Cuil — an old Irish word for knowledge, pronounced 'cool' — is the Menlo Park, California, search engine company that launched its giant tool the very evening of my clever cuilerie.

Cuil is set to give Google a run for its milkbones with a starting index of 120 billion web pages. Cuil's inventor, Anna Patterson, a former Google engineer, claims that this is larger than Google's index.

If anybuddy can succeed in matching milkbones with Google, it'd be the ex-Googlites running Cuil.

You geeky dogs will have judge for yourselves who's cooler. So far, I like Cuil's privacy policy: "Cuil analyzes the Web, not its users."

Cuil and Google use different search strategies. Cuil has a significantly different way of indexing the web and handling queries by users. By the way, these functions are super-big biz costs for Google: about a billion dollars a year to run their back-end infrastructure. Cuil claims to have found a way to massively reduce these costs.

Cuil also claims to have better search results than Google and other search engines 'cuz of how they index websites. They don't just catalog keywords on a site and rank the site based on its importance. The Cuil engine also works to understand how words are related and 'spozedly returns more relevant results (for example: dog types > smart dogs > beer lovers).

By the way, my cuil-ego-surf moment led me back to Wayne Pacelle's blog, A Humane Nation, where I'd posted a June 2008 comment. Wayne Pacelle is president and chief executive officer of the Humane Society of the United States.

How 'cuil' is that?

Paw notes: It didn't go unnoticed by us here that Google had an in memoriam tag on their homepage over the weekend for the late Carnegie Mellon professor Randy Pausch (1960–2008). Pausch was a virtual-reality pioneer and human-computer interaction researcher. To learn about the legacy of Randy Pausch, visit the webpage of his colleague Gabriel Robins.

Thanks to Chicoer.com for picking up the Cuil story off the AP wire and running it before Cuil's launch, thereby beating enews services like Yahoo!News to the announcement.