Jul 29 2008
Challenge to Google: Cuil, a new search engine
Google’s ex-employees have unveiled a new search engine named ‘Cuil’ (pronounced as cool) on Sunday to challenge the world’s leading search engine, Google. ‘Cuil’ will outdo the Internet search leader in size, but faces an uphill battle changing Web surfing habits.
Founded by Tom Costello, a former employee at IBM, and his wife Anna Patterson, who worked for Google for three years is named after the mythical Irish hero Fin McCuil. The two are joined by two former Google colleagues, Russell Power and Louis Monier. Monier also used to work at AltaVista, where he got the automated machine translator Babel Fish going. He later went to eBay to oversee a redesign.
Cuil (www.cuil.com) covers more web sites than any other search engine – three times more than Google and 10 times more than Microsoft.
“Our significant breakthroughs in search technology have enabled us to index much more of the Internet, placing nearly the entire Web at the fingertips of every user,” Tom Costello said.
Cuil Inc claims can index, faster and more cheaply, a far larger portion of the the Web than Google, which boasts the largest online index. Estimates have shown Google Index at around 30 to 50 billion web sites while Cuil claims it has already indexed 120 billion.
Google saves user data while Cuil doesn’t. Cuil says it wants to analyze the web, not users. Also Cuil does not display search hits as in columns with a brief text and an image unlike Goggle which shows a list of links and short key words. The operators called this new way of presenting hits “organized results” and claim that the hits are more easily readable this way.
Search results are not sorted by popularity, but rather by content in Cuil. Madrone Capital, Greylock and Tugboat Ventures have already invested $33m in the project. Madrone alone has put in $25m.
