Cuil (pronounced “cool”) is the creation of Google alumnus Anna Patterson, who is working in conjunction with her husband (former IBM employee Tom Costello) and two other ex Google engineers. Patterson’s last major search engine effort was purchased by the mighty Google in 2004. Costello’s previous efforts include a 1990’s search engine called Xift and IBM’s WebFountain technology. Monier is the former Chief Technology officer of AltaVista – considered by many to be the best search engine in the pre-Google webverse. This group has credentials. They also have funding, to the tune of $33 million in venture capital investments.
Cuil’s self-purported advantages over the competition (read: Google) are as follows
- More Links. The Cuil search engine claims an index spanning 120 billion web pages, dwarfing both Google’s most recently reported figure of 8.2 billion web pages and the industry’s estimate of 40 billion pages
- More privacy. Cuil promises not to track the habits of individual users, purporting to track general web trends instead. This feature seems designed to appeal to the privacy experts who have complained about Google’s invasive data gathering efforts.
- Content-based rankings. Cuil’s engine reportedly places more emphasis on the content of the page than which pages link to it. This is a potential advantage to both users more interested in research than buzz and content providers who concentrate on quality rather than social networking to build their sites.
Survey Says …
Alas, many engines have come and faltered in light of Google’s massive 62% market share (USA). How well did Cuil hold up on its opening day? Not too well, judging by reports in the IT media:
“If you are going to roll out a new search engine, please try to make one that has more going for it than a silly name and cheap, misleading PR. Thus we have Cuil, the search engine rolled out this last week by some ex-Google folks who see a market opportunity. While all the people involved seem competent and have great resumes, the site itself out-and-out stinks”
-John C. Dvorak
“Cuil went live last night and then went down after only a couple of hours of operation due to an apparently overwhelming response which lead to a server melt down. At the time of writing this article they were back up again, but you’d have thought that with all the hype around their launch they would have been better prepared?”
-New Zealand Herald
“What’s the first thing people check in a new, more-powerful Internet search? Their own name, of course. The SAI staff ran our own names through Cuil’s search. It hadn’t heard of some of us, while for others it returned our bylines next to pictures of… other people.
SAI’s commenters noted that searches for terms like “penguins” or “failure” returned zero results.”
-Silicon Valley Insider
Cuil’s lackluster performance is explained briefly in an equally critical CNET article
“Cuil isn’t set up as a massively parallel search network the way, say, Google is. Tom Costello had explained this to me a bit when we talked last week. Each of Cuil’s search appliances is specialized to a particular subcategory of results. There are machines that understand and index sports; others are experts on medicine, etc. As these search machines get overloaded, Sollitto said, they drop offline for some queries, and the machines left online return less-than-relevant results that then appear at the top of users’ pages.”
-WebWare
Overall, it can be said Cuil’s launch was one of the least successful in recent tech history. Is the criticism fair, however? Proceed to part 2 to find out!
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