A New Search Engine, "Cuil", Unveiled by Ex-Google Engineers

By Rajani Baburajan

TMCnet Contributing Editor

 

Cuil, a technology company founded by a team of ex-Google (News - Alert) engineers, have debuted a new search engine named Cuil.

 

Cuil is the brainchild of Anna Patterson, a former Google engineer. The new search engine is backed by a $33 million venture capital. Cuil is led by Patterson and her husband, Tom Costello. The team also includes other ex-engineers from Google, including Louis Monier and Russel Power. They hold the respective positions of Vice President of Products and Vice President of Engineering and Founder.

 

The name “Cuil” (pronounced “cool”) is derived from an old Irish word for knowledge, explained company officials. The company was previously known as “Cuill.” However, the team later decided to drop the last “l”.

 

According to Patterson, Cuil is three times the size of Google’s index. She said it has an index of 120 million Web pages. This figure, though, does not sound logical compared to the enormous database of contents handled by Google.

 

Google stopped publicizing its index size about three years ago when it contained about 8.2 billion Web sites. After listening to Cuil’s claims, Google spokespersons released a statement in their blog on Friday stating that it scans through 1 trillion Web links on a daily basis.

 

Cuil still believes that it surpasses Google with its organized results and increased privacy for contents. Cuil does not rank Web pages based on the popularity of the Web site; rather it does it so by analyzing the content on the page. Another difference lies in the organization of Web sites in the Cuil search engine result page (SERP).

 

Cuil adopts a magazine-style layout in which it classifies the search topic under different categories, making further search by concept or category easier, according to Cuil. Cuil also said that it does not cache personally identifiable information of users or their search histories.

 

Cuil is the latest to join Yahoo and Microsoft (News - Alert) to challenge Google. The increasing competition is less likely to affect Google, say officials. Being a creation of its own alumni, Google watches Cuil as a prospective rival.

 

“Having great competitors is a huge benefit to us and everyone in the search space,” said Google spokeswoman Katie Watson. “It makes us all work harder, and at the end of the day our users benefit from that.”