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Ex-Google engineers debut 'Cuil' way to search

AmorRoark

AmorRoark

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Ex-Google engineers debut 'Cuil' way to search

By MICHAEL LIEDTKE

SAN FRANCISCO (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 McCuill 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."
Click to expand...

link

I've checked it out and it absolutely seems "cuil". :D
 
No results because of high load...

Due to excessive load, our servers didn't return results. Please try your search again.
Click to expand...

not too cuil at all really.. can't very well be the google killer if you can't even serve up results
 
There's been rumblings about this project for a couple of years, in geek circles. And, much as I'm skeptical that a better mousetrap in search matters all that much nowadays, I also have to admit that when Google spun out of Stanford to challenge Yahoo, I thought exactly the same thing: who cares about a slightly better algorithm for ranking search pages, it just isn't the most important thing in the world.

Needless to say, I was spectacularly wrong about that - just like my prediction in 1998 that Microsoft had peaked and would lose market share rapidly. Basically, I suck. :D

Peace,

Fausty
 
Sucks.

I'm not the #1 hit for my name.

First place I turn up is on page 3, and then it's my comments on another site, not my own blog.

Clearly this search engine is in error.
 
What the address for cuil? I tried www.cuil.com and experienced epic failure.

[edit] Weird, it worked right away when I clicked on the link google provided me with, but going directly to the URL at first was not working.
 
Oh, nearly thought they were on to a good thing when I searched MDMA and the top hits included Erowid, but they've got (Scientologist propoganda site) No To Drugs, Yes to Life in the top ten.

I'll stick to Google, thanks.
 
Wow, the results for my name (which are always entertaining in google, all 300+ pages of them) at cuil.com are sort of random - and they seem to append random photos, with no connection whatsoever to the link, to the side of the summary text. What's that about?

The "Fausty" search results sort of suck. Disappointing.

It's good to see that the googlebombing pages from a few months back (which used my name and screen name as link fuel when I was the #4 most-searched term on google for a few days) have safely made the transition to cuil. The search gurus might build better algorithms for better search - but the search ranking hackers are already one step ahead, as usual.

Peace,

Fausty
 
Yep, heard about it for awhile. Louis rocks, too. Think they'd give me a job? :) I think they should have kept it "cuill", instead of dropping the second "l", though. Oh, well. Another one coming up is "twine". Stay tuned! :) Laters....specialr. :)
 
cuilsearchly8.png


Sorry about the 1920x1200
 
Fail. searching "son of shun" (a site of mine) does not return sonofshun.com on the 1st 5 pages. most results don't even seem to include the three words together

google returns it as #1

edit: i tried searching for "son of shun" in quote marks but it just returns the busy page forever and ever. n00bs
 
Maybe because its just been released.. Bet it has over 100 billion hits already
 
I wasn't able to search out my company site with it.

But I'm not exactly high traffic......... still come up on google though.
 
I did a search for "IV heroin and cocaine" in both Cuil and Google. Goolgle straight murdered that shit. Cuil brought up 2 pages that had nothing to do with the topic. Google brought up 2 million page with a solid top 10. I've always liked to side with the underdog but if Cuil is going to try and challenge Google, they need to come a little more correct.
 
After more extensive searching (mostly using hot news stories) I agree that it's fairly disorganized. I searched 'Indian Attacks' and got back some link to a Palestinian web forum at the very top. :\

Too bad because I really like the layout.
 
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