Cuil, a technology company pioneering a new approach to search, has unveiled its innovative search offering, which combines what it claims is the biggest Web index with content-based relevance methods, results organized by ideas, and complete user privacy. Cuil (www.Cuil.com) has indexed 120 billion Web pages, which the company says is three times more than any other search engine.
Cuil (pronounced COOL) provides organized and relevant results based on Web page content analysis. The search engine goes beyond today’s search techniques of link analysis and traffic ranking to analyze the context of each page and the concepts behind each query. It then organizes similar search results into groups and sorts them by category.
Cuil gives users a richer display of results and offers organizing features, such as tabs to clarify subjects, images to identify topics and search refining suggestions to help guide users to the results they seek.
“The Web continues to grow at a fantastic rate and other search engines are unable to keep up with it,” said Tom Costello, CEO and co-founder of Cuil. “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. In addition, Cuil presents searchers with content-based results, not just popular ones, providing different and more insightful answers that illustrate the vastness and the variety of the Web.”
Cuil’s technology was developed by a team with extensive history in search. The company is led by husband-and-wife team Tom Costello and Anna Patterson. Mr Costello researched and developed search engines at Stanford University and IBM; Ms Patterson is best known for her work at Google, where she was the architect of the company’s large search index and led a Web page ranking team.
They refused to accept the limitations of current search technology and dedicated themselves to building a more comprehensive search engine. Together with Russell Power, Anna’s former colleague from Google, they founded Cuil to give users the opportunity to explore the Internet more fully and discover its true potential.
“Since we met at Stanford, Tom and I have shared a vision of the ideal search engine,” said Anna Patterson, President and COO of Cuil. “Our team approaches search differently. By leveraging our expertise in search architecture and relevance methods, we’ve built a more efficient yet richer search engine from the ground up. The Internet has grown and we think it’s time search did too.”
Cuil’s methods guarantee online privacy for searchers. Since the search engine ranks pages based on content instead of number of clicks, personal data collection is unnecessary, so personal search history is always private.
(Source: Cuil)
on Jul 28th, 2008 at 13:04
I remember when we changed from Altavista to Google at Radio Netherlands in 1999. We did so because the results on everything we tried were better - and more trustworthy. Having tried Cuil on some subjects I know about, I find a lot of mistakes. I am not sure I want more - I want better. At the moment, I wouldn’t trust it on subjects I know little about. Should we wait before passing judgement? Yes? Is Google shaking in its boots. No - not for a long time.
on Jul 28th, 2008 at 13:20
“Due to overwhelming interest, our Cuil servers are running a bit hot right now. The search engine is momentarily unavailable as we add more capacity.”
Oops!
on Jul 28th, 2008 at 13:25
There must have been a surge of interest in the past hour since I published the story
Or maybe their servers couldn’t cope with what Jonathan threw at them (see above). Back to the drawing board…
on Jul 28th, 2008 at 19:30
Send your feedback to: feedback@cuil.com. I just did. It wasn’t pretty.
on Jul 29th, 2008 at 06:02
I wonder how they intend to make money.
on Jul 29th, 2008 at 09:33
That name is a bit of a burden. Quill? Cowl? Coo-ill? And possibly “cull” till I noticed the “i”. I’d never have thought of pronouncing it as “cool”.