The search engine industry normally calms down during the summer months (most of these companies are on the Northern Hemisphere where there is summer now).

This week, however, we witnessed the birth of a new large scale search engine, the first one in a long time.

Cuil (pronounced /ku:l/ or “cool”) seems to rely less on link popularity and more on the content of the web pages they find when ranking results.

Immediately this strikes us a step back, search quality wise, as this is a method other search engines left years ago. Such an algorithm is, for instance, easier to spam.

Still, the people behind Cuil are experts with long experience from search engines like Google and AltaVista. They may have tricks up their sleeves we haven’t seen yet.

Cuil had some serious difficulties the first day of its launch and the reviews were mixed (see below), but the search results are not bad.

We always welcome new professional actors in this market. Ask’s plan to abandon its own search technology, and the present Microsoft/Yahoo! fight means that Google have too few serious competitors. That is not good for innovation, within or outside Google.

Read more about Cuil in Lars Våge’s article here at Pandia.

Read also about Google’s Knol, which mistakenly has been labeled a Wikipedia competitor by the press. It is, actually, more like Squidoo, a site gathering content written by experts and enthusiasts.

Here’s more interesting search engine stuff from around the Web:

• Microsoft Live Search Gets a New Look with ‘Hotspots’!

  Live includes background images on search page (PageTraffic Blog July 31 2008)

• Yahoo Survives Annual Meeting, Re-Elects Board, Microsoft Cries Foul

  Today Yahoo survived its long-anticipated shareholder meeting. (SE Land Aug 1 2008)

• Yahoo! Introduces new Features to Yahoo! Maps!

  PageTraffic presents a large number of new features on Yahoo Maps (Aug 2 2008)

• Cuil - long on marketing, short on effectiveness

  Phil Bradley is not too impressed about the new search engine (July 30 2008)

• Presenting: delicious 2.0 (finally!)

  If you’re a delicious user, you’ll be happy to know that none of your favorite features have changed one bit (About July 31 2008)

• Cuil: Good, But Not Great

  In Read/Write’s test Cuil performed nowhere near as well as Google. (July 28 2008)

• Cuil Stumbles out of the Gate

  The site has had performance and availability problems throughout the first day, and asearch market observers has declared the engine’s results unimpressive. (PC World July 28 2008)

• Dinosaur sightings: Old search engines

  Screenshot gallery of ancient search engines (News.com Aug 1 2008)

• July 2008 Search Engine Market Share

  Google remains the champion (EMP undated)

• After weird first date, Icahn avoiding Yahoo shareholder meeting because it’s like, totally awkward

  Yahoo shareholder rebel avoids shareholder meeting (Industry Standard July 31 2008)

• Will Cuil Kill Google?

  The Motley Fool takes a look at the new search engine (July 28 2008)

• Google Knol/Wikipedia Comparison Faulty

  Andrew Lih argues that Knol cannot be compared directly with Wikipedia (July 28 2008)

• Shopping Search Engines and the “Amazon Taxâ€?

  On New York State’s collection of sales tax from online merchants based outside its borders (AltSearchEngines July 29 2008)

• Knol launches onto the world

  Google has just launched Knol: a unit of knowledge onto the world (Phil Bradley July 24 2008)

• Health Search Part II - Trusera

  Trusera offers an online health network where you can find and share real world experiences with others who’ve been there. (AltSearchEngines July 25 2008)

• Exploring Ways to Make Search Better than Ever

  Rob Knies of Microsoft Research on 16 papers Microsoft Research has had accepted for SIGIR 2008, the 31st annual conference of the Association for Computing Machinery’s Special Interest Group on Information Retrieval. (undated)

• Microsoft’s Browser Rank

  Microsoft has been working to find ways to know exactly which pages to index and reindex without spidering the bulk of the Web pages each time. (Beyond Search July 26 2008)