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Subject: " Ex-Google workers unveil new search engine-- Cuil" Previous topic | Next topic
jujet84Mon Jul-28-08 12:54 PM
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" Ex-Google workers unveil new search engine-- Cuil"


          

Ex-Google workers unveil new search engine

MICHAEL LIEDTKE
The Associated Press

SAN FRANCISCO – 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."

Check it out http://www.cuil.com/

  

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RE: Ex-Google workers unveil new search engine-- Cui...
Jul 28th 2008
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RE: Ex-Google workers unveil new search engine-- Cui...
Jul 28th 2008
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      RE: Ex-Google workers unveil new search engine-- Cui...
Jul 28th 2008
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           RE: Ex-Google workers unveil new search engine-- Cui...
Jul 28th 2008
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Jul 29th 2008
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JordanMon Jul-28-08 01:20 PM
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#1. "RE: Ex-Google workers unveil new search engine-- Cuil"
In response to jujet84 (Reply # 0)
Mon Jul-28-08 01:21 PM by Jordan

  

          

I tried it the first thing today and received zero results on the first two searches I made.
After using it for awhile I do not care much for the interface. I find it to be cluttered making it difficult to assess the results.
User preferences are very limited. Performance is only decent at best.

  

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WakkoMon Jul-28-08 02:10 PM
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#2. "RE: Ex-Google workers unveil new search engine-- Cuil"
In response to Jordan (Reply # 1)


  

          

Tried it as well, its not as accurate as they'd like to let you believe.

Searching for "wow alakhzam" intentionally misspelled, I got 0 results.
Searching for "allakahzam", brought back links that were to the wrong website (http://theblackcoffee.info/allakahzam-world-of-warcraft.html) instead of (http://wow.allakhazam.com/)

It didn't offer any corrected spellings, nor did it seem to find the right websites even when giving accurate information.

Not impressed as yet.

  

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DarrenMon Jul-28-08 02:18 PM
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#3. "RE: Ex-Google workers unveil new search engine-- Cuil"
In response to Wakko (Reply # 2)
Mon Jul-28-08 03:36 PM by Darren

  

          

I don't think it's even officially online yet.?

Edit: I guess it is, but I don't think Google has anything to worry about at the moment.

  

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JordanMon Jul-28-08 02:56 PM
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#4. "RE: Ex-Google workers unveil new search engine-- Cuil"
In response to Darren (Reply # 3)
Mon Jul-28-08 03:01 PM by Jordan

  

          

"Search site aims to rival Google

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/7528503.stm

The Cuil homepage is even more sparse than Google's
Former workers at the web giant Google have launched a rival search engine.

Called Cuil, from the Gaelic for knowledge and hazel, its founders claim it does a better and more comprehensive job of indexing information online.

The technology it uses to index the web can understand the context surrounding each page and the concepts driving search requests, say the founders.

But analysts believe the new search engine, like many others, will struggle to match and defeat Google.

Hard fight

Cuil, pronounced "cool", says it uses more than 120 billion webpages to build up its index of the information it finds on the web.

It claims this is more than Google uses though the search giant has stopped reporting how much it indexes. Without revealing numbers Google claimed its index was still bigger.

Cuil claims that its technology moves away from the methods that have driven Google's success.

Instead of just looking at the number and quality of links to and from a webpage as Google's technology does, Cuil attempts to understand more about the information on a page and the terms people use to search. Results are displayed in a magazine format rather than a list.

The company is also trying to set itself apart from Google by not retaining any information about what people search for.

Cuil founders, Anna Patterson, Russell Power and Louis Monier are former Google staffers. The other founder Tom Patterson worked for IBM and others on search and storage technologies.

By declaring its aim of taking on Google, Cuil joins a long list of others that have tried and largely failed to dent the search giant's market share. Other contenders include Teoma, Vivisimo, Snap, Mahalo and Powerset.

"The time may be right for a challenger," said Danny Sullivan, editor in chief of Search Engine Land. "Competing with Google is still a very daunting task, as Microsoft will tell you.""

http://www.cuil.com/

  

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Jim FisherTue Jul-29-08 09:35 PM
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#5. "RE: Ex-Google workers unveil new search engine-- Cuil"
In response to Jordan (Reply # 4)


          

The thing I've noticed about it so far is that the displayed photos don't necessarily have any relation to the search query...I put my name and web site in as a search and it displayed a picture of a yellow MGB...there's nothing at all about sports cars on the site and no links to any...I just checked again on some other searches and similar irrelevant photos show up. Perhaps they'll fine tune it a bit. I don't think Google is under any threat right now though..Jim.

  

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lenjackTue Jul-29-08 11:25 PM
Member since Nov 13th 2001
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#6. "RE: Ex-Google workers unveil new search engine-- Cuil"
In response to Jim Fisher (Reply # 5)


          

It very clearly sucks. Too bad...you know how important first impressions are.

  

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