Former Google Employees Launch Rival Search Engine Cuil [7/28/2008]

Move over Google, there’s a new search engine in town – Cuil. It was launched by former Google employees Anna Patterson and her husband, Tom Costello, along with a few other Google departees.

Patterson was employed by search engine giant Google for two years, constructing what some deem the pillars of that company’s search engine. Among these achievements are its monstrous database of indexed web pages, as well as the formula Google uses to rank search results.

Using this knowledge, Cuil has promised to index more pages and return more relevant results than Google.

Cuil, which is pronounced “cool,” is the most recent entry into a market that is trying to compete with Google, as well as Microsoft and Yahoo. Google is still the search engine of choice for most online surfers, accounting for almost 62% of searches as of this past June. Yahoo was a distant second at almost 21%, with Microsoft rounding out the top three at just over 9%.

Companies like Microsoft are continuously making moves to challenge Google. As an example, it recently bought Powerset. Wikipedia is another competitor on this playing ground. None, however, have come close to challenging Google yet though.

There are some industry experts that say Cuil might change that, given the talent behind it.

Cuil co-founder and former Stanford researcher Mr. Costello says that Cuil has indexed over 120 billion web pages. The way it mines data is different from Google in that it groups pages by content. Mr. Costello contends that Cuil is more efficient. The company also shows results differently than Google, using images and showing more preview text. More web tools are provided to help surfers further refine their searches.

What does Google have to say about all this?

There was no official comment from the company, and Google declined to say how many pages exist in its database. A short email statement basically said that it welcomes competition and that Google maintains “the largest collection of documents searchable on the Web.”

Danny Sullivan, editor of Search Engine Land, an e-zine on search marketing and search engines, was not impressed by the Cuil assertion that it has indexed more pages on the web than anyone else. He sums it up by saying that surfers could be inundated with “a whole bunch of junk.”

Taking a wait and see attitude, he maintained that if Cuil returned relevant results, he could see use spreading among web surfers and gaining popularity. But, will it ever be able to challenge Google? Or, Microsoft or Yahoo for that matter? This remains to be seen.

Cuil is run out of Menlo Park, CA and has roughly 30 employees. No doubt because of the pedigree of its founders, it has raised some $33 million from venture investors.

For more insight visit Search Engine Optimization Services

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