YESTERDAY Cuil launched, calling itself “the biggest search engine on the Web.” Cuil (pronounced “cool”) has put forward a new approach to search, which combines the biggest Web index with content-based relevance methods, results organized by ideas and complete user privacy.
Cuil (www.cuil.com) claims to have indexed 120 billion Web pages, three times more than any other search engine. In its blog on Friday, Google noted that it had discovered one trillion unique Web pages on the Internet, but did not give an updated number on how many of those pages it has indexed. Google stated that it doesn’t index all the Web links because they either point to similar content or would diminish the quality of its search results in some other way. A search index’s scope is important because content can’t be found unless it’s stored in a database.
The new Cuil search engine provides organized and relevant results based on Web page content analysis. The search engine goes beyond today’s search techniques of link analysis and traffic ranking, to analyze the context of each page and the concepts behind each query. It then organizes similar search results into groups and sorts them by category. Cuil gives users a richer display of results and offers organizing features, such as tabs to clarify subjects, images to identify topics and search refining suggestions to help guide users to the results they seek.
“The Web continues to grow at a fantastic rate and other search engines are unable to keep up with it,” said Tom Costello, CEO and co-founder of Cuil. “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. In addition, Cuil presents searchers with content-based results, not just popular ones, providing different and more insightful answers that illustrate the vastness and the variety of the Web.”
Cuil’s technology was developed by professionals with extensive history in search. The company is led by husband-and-wife team Tom Costello and Anna Patterson. Costello researched and developed search engines at Stanford University and IBM. Patterson is best known for her work at Google. The last search engine technology she created was bought by Google in 2004 to upgrade its own offering. While at Google, Patterson was the architect of the company’s large search index and led a Web page ranking team.
Costello and Patterson believed that search technology could be improved. Since 2006, when Patterson left Google, the couple have dedicated themselves to building a more comprehensive search engine. Together with Russell Power, Patterson’s colleague from Google, they founded Cuil to give users the opportunity to explore the Internet more fully, discover its true potential — and of course enable Cuil to earn big bucks. “Since we met at Stanford, Tom and I have shared a vision of the ideal search engine,” said Patterson, president and COO of Cuil. “Our team approaches search differently. 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.”
Unlike Google, Cuil’s methods guarantee online privacy for searchers. Since the search engine ranks pages based on content instead of number of clicks, personal data collection is unnecessary, so personal search history is always private. Cuil’s features include:
• Biggest Internet search engine — Cuil has indexed 120 billion Web pages, three times more than any other search engine.
• Organized results — Cuil’s magazine-style layout separates results by subject and allows further search by concept or category.
• Different results — Cuil ranks results by the content on each page, not its popularity.
Cuil is backed by $33 million in venture capital. It will need every penny and more if it is to scale rapidly enough to be a serious contender to Google. The search engine was clearly having teething problems yesterday. Several times when Arab News attempted to try the online application, the following message appeared instead:
“We’ll be back soon ... Due to overwhelming interest, our Cuil servers are running a bit hot right now. The search engine is momentarily unavailable as we add more capacity. Thanks for your patience.”
When it comes to search, nobody waits. They just click to Google.
