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'Cool' new rival set to challenge Google?
Ex-Googlers unveil Cuil search

By Reuters

Published: Monday 28 July 2008

A start-up led by former star Google engineers has unveiled a new web search service that aims to outdo the internet search leader in size, but faces an uphill battle changing web surfing habits.

Cuil (pronounced "cool") is offering a new search service at www.cuil.com that the company claims can index, faster and more cheaply, a far larger portion of the web than Google, which boasts the largest online index.

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The would-be Google rival says its service goes beyond prevailing search techniques that focus on web links and audience traffic patterns and instead analyses the context of each page and the concepts behind each user search request.

Tom Costello, Cuil co-founder and chief executive, said in a statement: "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."

Danny Sullivan, a web search analyst and editor-in-chief of Search Engine Land, said Cuil can try to exploit complaints consumers may have with Google - namely, that it tries to do too much, that its results favour already popular sites, and that it leans heavily on certain authoritative sites such as Wikipedia.

Sullivan said: "The time may be right for a challenger," but added: "Competing with Google is still a very daunting task, as Microsoft will tell you."

Microsoft, the number three US player in web search has been seeking to join forces with number two Yahoo! to battle Google.

Cuil was founded by a group of search pioneers, including Costello, who built a prototype of Web Fountain, IBM's web search analytics tool, and Anna Patterson, the architect of Google's massive TeraGoogle index of web pages. Patterson also designed the search system for global corporate document storage company Recall.

The two are joined by two former Google colleagues, Russell Power and Louis Monier. Previously, Monier led the redesign of ecommerce leader eBay's search engine and was the founding CTO of two 1990s web milestones, AltaVista and BabelFish, the first language translation site.

Sullivan says of Cuil: "They do have the talent that is used to build large, industrial-strength search engines."

Cuil clusters the results of each web search performed on the service into groups of related web pages. It sorts these by categories and offers various organising features to help identify topics and allow the user to quickly refine searches.

User privacy is another appeal of its approach, Cuil says. Because the service focuses on the content of the pages rather than click history, the company has no need to store users' personal information or their search histories, it says.

Patterson says: "We are all about pattern analysis. We go over the corpus [web pages] 12 times before we even index it."

Cuil has indexed a whopping 120 billion web pages, three times more than what they say Google now indexes, Patterson said, adding the company has spent just $5m.