Will New Search Engine Upstage Google?

Former Google Engineers Debut "Cuil" Way To Scour Internet

(AP)  Anna Patterson's last Internet search engine was so impressive that industry leader Google Inc. bought the technology in 2004 to upgrade its own system.

She believes her latest invention is even more valuable - only this time it's not for sale.

Patterson instead intends to upstage Google, which she quit in 2006 to develop a more comprehensive and efficient way to scour the Internet.

The end result is Cuil, pronounced "cool." Backed by $33 million in venture capital, the search engine plans to begin processing requests for the first time Monday.

Cuil had kept a low profile while Patterson, her husband, Tom Costello, and two other former Google engineers - Russell Power and Louis Monier - searched for better ways to search.

Now, it's boasting time.

For starters, Cuil's search index spans 120 billion Web pages.

Patterson believes that's at least three times the size of Google's index, although there is no way to know for certain. Google stopped publicly quantifying its index's breadth nearly three years ago when the catalog spanned 8.2 billion Web pages.

Cuil won't divulge the formula it has developed to cover a wider swath of the Web with far fewer computers than Google. And Google isn't ceding the point: Spokeswoman Katie Watson said her company still believes its index is the largest.

After getting inquiries about Cuil, Google asserted on its blog Friday that it regularly scans through 1 trillion unique Web links. But Google said it doesn't index them all because they either point to similar content or would diminish the quality of its search results in some other way. The posting didn't quantify the size of Google's index.

A search index's scope is important because information, pictures and content can't be found unless they're stored in a database. But Cuil believes it will outshine Google in several other ways, including its method for identifying and displaying pertinent results.

Rather than trying to mimic Google's method of ranking the quantity and quality of links to Web sites, Patterson says Cuil's technology drills into the actual content of a page. And Cuil's results will be presented in a more magazine-like format instead of just a vertical stack of Web links. Cuil's results are displayed with more photos spread horizontally across the page and include sidebars that can be clicked on to learn more about topics related to the original search request.

Finally, Cuil is hoping to attract traffic by promising not to retain information about its users' search histories or surfing patterns - something that Google does, much to the consternation of privacy watchdogs.

Cuil is just the latest in a long line of Google challengers.

The list includes swaggering startups like Teoma (whose technology became the backbone of Ask.com), Vivisimo, Snap, Mahalo and, most recently, Powerset, which was acquired by Microsoft Corp. this month.

Even after investing hundreds of millions of dollars on search, both Microsoft and Yahoo Inc. have been losing ground to Google. Through May, Google held a 62 percent share of the U.S. search market followed by Yahoo at 21 percent and Microsoft at 8.5 percent, according to comScore Inc.

Google has become so synonymous with Internet search that it may no longer matter how good Cuil or any other challenger is, said Gartner Inc. analyst Allen Weiner.

"Search has become as much about branding as anything else," Weiner said. "I doubt (Cuil) will be keeping anyone at Google awake at night."

Google welcomed Cuil to the fray with its usual mantra about its rivals. "Having great competitors is a huge benefit to us and everyone in the search space," Watson said. "It makes us all work harder, and at the end of the day our users benefit from that."

But this will be the first time that Google has battled a general-purpose search engine created by its own alumni. It probably won't be the last time, given that Google now has nearly 20,000 employees.

Patterson joined Google in 2004 after she built and sold Recall, a search index that probed old Web sites for the Internet Archive. She and Power worked on the same team at Google.

Although he also worked for Google for a short time, Monier is best known as the former chief technology officer of AltaVista, which was considered the best search engine before Google came along in 1998. Monier also helped build the search engine on eBay's online auction site.

The trio of former Googlers are teaming up with Patterson's husband, Costello, who built a once-promising search engine called Xift in the late 1990s. He later joined IBM Corp., where he worked on an "analytic engine" called WebFountain.

Costello's Irish heritage inspired Cuil's odd name. It was derived from a character named Finn McCuilll in Celtic folklore.

Patterson enjoyed her time at Google, but became disenchanted with the company's approach to search. "Google has looked pretty much the same for 10 years now," she said, "and I can guarantee it will look the same a year from now."

[barbaram99]

I don''t want to change my home page.. There is no way to add cyil to the brawser/have google,yahoo,MSN.ask/ I put as many as I can,

[wiccantexan]

The Cuil search engine is a piece of junk.

My last posts were taken from an article written by ANITA HAMILTON, from Time.Com Pretty much what I thought yesterday and this morning.

The one area where Cuil excels, however, is user privacy. Whereas Google stores user-specific searches for up to 18 months, Cuil never stores personally identifiable information or search histories. Privacy has become a growing concern among users of search sites ever since America Online inadvertently released the searches of 658,000 of its users in 2006. But that''s unlikely to be enough to persuade most users to switch from their search engine of choice. "Anybody who thinks the next Google killer is going to come along is banking on something that''s unlikely," says SearchEngineLand''s Sullivan. But if the Cuil story is any indication, that won''t stop people spending fortunes on beating the odds.

Cuil has a distinctive, if old-fashioned, approach to indexing websites. Instead of ranking them based on popularity, as Google does, it focuses on the content of each page. That may make sense in theory %u2014 after all, the most popular restaurants, for example, rarely serve the best food %u2014 but it is precisely the model that Google broke away from in order to give users more relevant results. That could explain why a Cuil search on "insomnia" directs the user to the American Insomnia Association rather than to the Wikipedia entry on the subject pulled up first by most other search engines.

Cuil''s distinctive design, in which results appear in three columns across the page, also allows for longer previews of each site''s content. But other search sites make better use of page real estate. SearchMe, which launched earlier this year, offers full-page snapshots in its results, through which you can flip like the album covers on iTunes. And the number 4-ranked search engine, Ask, also uses a wider layout to display both images and sub-categories for refining one''s search.

The hype over Cuil, in fact, may be testament to the power of a great back story. Cuil is the brainchild of ex-Google staffer Anna Patterson %u2014 who developed the TeraGoogle indexing system that Google still uses today %u2014 and her husband Tom Costello, who developed search engines at Stanford and IBM. Cuil indexes some 120 billion Web pages. (Google, on the other hand, claims to scan more than a trillion pages, but only indexes those that are useful, according to the company.) The Cuil team generated so much buzz for its venture that it managed to raise some $33 million in financing. But the acid test of any search site is the results it generates, and for now, anyway, Cuil falls way short of the industry''s leaders, and even for that matter, of many startups.

Despite its lackluster performance, Cuil (which means wisdom or knowledge in Gaelic) got so many visitors on Monday, that its servers crashed around 3 p.m. E.T. "Due to excessive load, our servers didn''t return results. Please try your search again," the site read intermittently throughout the afternoon. But even when it was working, the results were fair, at best. Enter a keyword such as "mint" and the first result that comes up isn''t the herb or flavor but the U.S. Mint. Type in "Obama," and one of the sub-categories Cuil suggests is "Hispanic-American Politicians". And Cuil lacks the special tabs for news, video, local and image results used by the leading sites.

[ibzjem]

haven''t tried it yet, but will. give it some time, it may need some kinks worked out.

Google increasingly returns the same junk sites over and over again.

If any of you are engineers, try searching for an IC or component without getting the freepatentsonline.com site or the alldatasheet site. It gets annoying.

[johngoodnews]

Ooops..johngoodnews apologizes for his bad, just posted...

I was wrong about test search not turning up something I routinely see on a Google search. It was there but I didn''t notice that my computer cuts off the "3rd page" (default) format at two pages....oooops oooops my apologies. My general remark remains the same, but with no exceptions: it''s an excellent search engine. Now, how do I put it up there in my search bar.

[johngoodnews]

I just ran a cuil search that I routinely run and the results were excellent except for one small, but highly objectionable fault: cuil did not return a very informative, but non-commercial in any way, review that always pops up when I do it on Google. I found that disturbing.

[eddom949]

$33 million, what do you want to bet they''re hiring? I''m sorry, but again, this is ingratiation with money. It should be called "The 33 million dollar algorithm," same story.

[ZettaPixel]

It''s ***.

[lt0168-2009]

I tested the search engine today. Being into genealogy I entered a genealogy term I''ve used frequently. Cuil returned about 6 hits. Everyone referred to a link on my own web page, but had links to different commercial pages. What''s with that?

[jaykay3141]

/* I hope the new search engine blocks sites that are unfit for Christian viewing. */

That line sounded better in the original Latin - - - during the Inquisition.

[smurfcrusher]

"Will New Search Engine Upstage Google?"

No.

[wl7bzh]

Cuill needs googles search options to narrow down results. This new engine is not specific enough.

uhhh, no!

[erehak]

Just tried to search on my own name. Only one entry came up on Cuil, while I get several hits on Google. Cuil indicated that there were 526 results but gave me no way to get to any of them.

[Syndicate]

I just tried it. I didn''t care much for it. The results seemed to have little to do with what i was looking for. For example if you type "Tiger" into Google the first result is usually Tiger Direct. which is what I wanted. I had to search a little harder on cuil. Also When I google my name I get lots of hits on google, cuil none. I''m not impressed.