Cuil - search plug-in for Mozilla Firefox

Another search engine has come on line (online?) in the last week or two. It goes by the name of cuil - the name derives from the phonetic spelling of a trendy way of pronouncing the word "cool". I had a go with it, and it is definitely a bit different to the big old Google search engine experience. Looking at their privacy information cuil doesn't appear to be storing anything to do with who is searching for what, given Google's stance on privacy some might consider this new alternative.

I thought I'd give cuil a good chance by using them and thought that I might promote this search engine by writing a simple search plug-in for Firefox as there didn't appear to be one on the official Mozilla plug-in download page. If anyone knows how to submit search plug-ins to Mozilla then I'd be interested to know - I don't have the time in between all my charity work to find out this myself!

To install the plug-in just save the following text as cuil.xml in the "searchplugins" directory under the installation directory of Mozilla Firefox.

<SearchPlugin 
    xmlns="http://www.mozilla.org/2006/browser/search/">
<ShortName>Cuil</ShortName>
<Description>Cuil Search</Description>
<InputEncoding>UTF-8</InputEncoding>
<Image width="16" height="16">data:image/x-icon;base64,R0lGODlhE
AAQAKUzAAAAAAABAQEBAQEDBQMDAwIJEgsLCwsLDAINHQwMDAwMDQQSJxARERQVFR8gISA
hIQskSAwmSiYmJwkvZhEzZDk6Ozo8PTs9Pj4/QEdISVhaXBdx8xdy9Rl1+X6BhYeKjoyQk
5CUl5CUmJKWmpOXm5SYnJabn5eboJicoJicoZmdoZqeopqeo5ugpJygpJyhpZ2hpZ2ipp+
jp////////////////////////////////////////////////////yH5BAEKAD8ALAAAA
AAQABAAAAZmQIBwSCwaj8ikcqlEAD6e5YSzWIWIAkBWm6UArEIQLNZAPQCyV6Tzva5UlhO
A5PiiIJs2wKQRBOZ1K3d5YC0gAAYAJRkALIN6GCUqIxIuJSkkjysiQxUMQhcECgkDBQAKB
0yqq0lBADs=</Image>
<Url type="text/html" method="GET" 
    template="http://www.cuil.com/search">
  <Param name="q" value="{searchTerms}"/>
  <!-- Dynamic parameters -->
  <Param name="rls" 
    value="{moz:distributionID}:{moz:locale}:{moz:official}"/>
  <MozParam name="client" condition="defaultEngine" 
    trueValue="firefox-a" falseValue="firefox"/>
</Url>
</SearchPlugin>

Happy browsing from the nofear.org technology team!