A Very Cuil Search Engine
By Azam on July 28, 2008
Searching for a better way, Cuil pronounced “cool” is seeking to upstage Goolge in the Search Engine results. A lot of people would dismiss such an audacious effort, except the people behind the search engine are from Google itself. Google is familiar with Anna Paterson work in search is well ranked in Google acquisition of her company Recall with its large indexing capacity before working on Google search indexing“ TeraGoogle” , web ranking group, and ad matching technology.
Patterson left Google in 2006 to develop a more comprehensive and efficient way to search the Internet. Cuil is comprised of a team for former search engineers form Google, AltaVista, and IBM, Ann Patterson and her husband Tom Costello team with former Google engineers Russell Power and Louis Monier for building a better general search engine. Tom Costello worked on IBM efforts in search with search engine called Xift in the late 1990s and then IBM’s “analytic engine” called WebFountain. Ann Patterson and Russell Power worked on the same group at Google.
Monier is the former chief technology officer of AltaVista, which was considered the best search engine technology before Google came on the scene in 1998. Monier also helped build the search engine on eBay’s online auction site.
The Cuil Differentiation
Cuil plans to improve on search results moving beyond Google’s Page Rank methodology of ranking quanity and quality of links to a particular website. Cuils aims to delve deeper into the actual content on the website pages. The UI of the results is distinguished by a “magazine “ format of results containing more info like photo displayed across the page in horizontal orientation with sidebars for more info on topics related to search topics. Also, Cuil is offering more privacy in the search effort by not retaining info related to individuals’ information or behavioral search history patterns
Cuil Index
Cuil claims the largest search index of any search engine. Cuil states the size of its index to be 120B websites. Google last reported the size of 8.2B 3yrs ago and currently mentions it is in the range of 1T. Google mentioned that it does not keep the track of sites it visits on the database due to quality of links. Cuil estimates their index is approximately 3x the size of Google.
Search Engine is a tough industry based on the ranking and money spent hundreds of millions by Yahoo and Microsoft to compete against each other and Google. Previously partnerned with Google for search , Yahoo went on to acquire Inktomi, Overture and Altavista; Microsoft recently acquired Powerset to enhance search effort. Both Yahoo and Microsoft made little head way in search with Google predominance with leading majority share dominance in the general search. Google is also synonymous with search and has become part of the vernacular as a verb: looking up something on the Internet.
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.
Why would Cuil succeed against Google?
In Silicon Valley, only the paranoid survive and taking a different approach is likely to upend any dominate technology as long as they fail to innovate against the completion. It is not uncommon for individuals leaving former employers and partner to only outdo the former in technology. The small, fast, and agile companies are able to embrace change and stay hungry for success in order to survive and succeed. The search industry is still in the infancy stages and we have a long way to go before future decides the best way to search.
Patterson said she 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.”
Categories : Tech
Tags : AltaVista, Anna Patterson, Cuil, Goolge, IBM, Louis Monier, Microsoft, Powerset, Russell Power, Search, Search Index, Tom Costello, yahoo
Apparently Cuil was not quite ready for launch during the first day or two - many medium long tail queries did not return results at all, and even general queries returned way fewer results than they should have considering Cuil’s claims of having indexed so many pages already. They did improve somewhat afterward, however, and seem to be picking up more results and increasing relevance as more people have been testing out the engine.
In the long run, I hope they get things together and perform well enough to compete with the major search engines and then maybe do some advertising. I would like to see more serious competitors to Google in order to hold their power in check and encourage more transparency overall.