New search engine takes aim at Google

[hari]

There's a big new search engine launching Monday: Cuil. Developed and run by the husband-and-wife team of Stanford professor Tom Costello and former Google search architect Anna Patterson, it's pitched as bigger, faster, and better than Google's flagship search engine in pretty much every way. See video interview with Tom Costello, below.

I have not had a chance to spend much time with the engine. I'm getting open access to it the same time you are. I did get a preview. It's a very serious effort, and it has enough funding to get off the ground and become a player.

The most important difference between Cuil and Google is its ranking system. Rather than assigning priority to pages based on inbound links as Google does ("Pagerank"), Cuil analyzes the content of Web pages to divine their relevance to a search query. Costello bristled when I asked if this was a semantic search engine like PowerSet (recently sold to Microsoft). Costello said Cuil's search is "contextual," and that, "we're trying to understand the real world, not the Web."



What this means, in the real world, is that Cuil results are automatically categorized. When you search for a common name, for example, Cuil will give you a result page where results for different individuals with that name are groups under tabs. It will also break out sub-topics related to each name. In Cuil's canned demo, if you search for "Harry," there are different tabs for "Harry Potter" and "Prince Harry of Wales." On the Harry Potter tab, you'll get further sub-links devoted to actors, Gryffindor dorm-mates, etc. "We have a strong ontological commitment," Costello told me, meaning that parsing search results into readable chunks is a very big part of the Cuil value proposition.

The service also displays images from Web results whenever possible. It all adds up to search results pages that are much more attractive, and useful, than Google's.

Another potential advantage of the context-based search is that it allows Cuil searches to be more respectful of user privacy. Unlike Google, which simply has to track every single click to refine its index, Cuil's context-based search does not. In practice, the distinction may be moot because Cuil will need to track clicks to see if their results are actually working for people, but it could serve as a marketable distinction.

Context-based indexing also presents a juicier target for search spammers, but as Costello says, "that's a success problem."

It's one thing to have a nice interface and show users good results, but the size of the Web index that the engine has access to matters a lot as well. And this is where Cuil makes its boldest claim. Costello says that the engine is launching with 120 billion pages indexed, well over the 40 billion he says Google has (although see Google's latest bluster about the company's power at Web indexing). Costello also claims that Cuil's Web crawler is three times faster than Google's, although it wasn't clear to me if he meant that is per search computer or for the entire system. Compared with Google's globe-spanning data network of data centers, some literally set up near dams so they can tap hydro power more efficiently, Cuil's two puny data centers hosting less than 2,000 PCs total will have to run pretty fast to outpace Google's crawlers.

Cuil will launch on Monday, and in a refreshing (and gutsy) move, the site is just plain launching. There's no weasely "beta" tag applied to the service. Costello thinks it'll be good enough to use from day one.

It won't, though, be as complete as Google. While Google has had failures in extending its brand (Froogle, Google Base), its collection of services that are affiliated with its mainstream search product, like Google Maps, Image Search, and desktop search, can make switching away from Google difficult for users. Costello realizes that Cuil needs to layer in additional services, but as he said to me, the company has to start somewhere.





Upshot: Cuil is certainly worth trying out. If you like it, services to put it in front of your face (a browser toolbar, and widgets) are coming soon.

As a business proposition, Cuil is obviously a big bet. While search is a monetizable business, it's hard to change the behavior of a generation of Web users who think "Google" is a verb. No other search engine has come close to entering the public consciousness like this. Of course, Cuil doesn't have to trounce Google on day one. It took Google quite some time to surpass Alta Vista and Yahoo in the search wars.

[magesh.p]

Ex-Google engineers debut 'Cuill' way to search

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 Cuill, pronounced "cool." Backed by $33 million in venture capital, the search engine plans to begin processing requests for the first time Monday.

Cuill 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, Cuill'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.

Cuill 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 Cuill, 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 Cuill 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 Cuill's technology drills into the actual content of a page. And Cuill's results will be presented in a more magazine-like format instead of just a vertical stack of Web links. Cuill'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, Cuill 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.

Cuill 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 Cuill 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 (Cuill) will be keeping anyone at Google awake at night."

Google welcomed Cuill 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 Cuill's odd name. It was derived from a character named Finn McCuilll 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."

Source : Yahoo

[hari]

[blink]Google's new competition: Ex-employees

[/blink]

A start-up led by former star Google engineers has unveiled a new Web search service that aims to outdo the Internet search leader in size, but faces an uphill battle changing Web surfing habits.

Cuil Inc (pronounced "cool") is offering a new search service at cuil.com that the company claims can index, faster and more cheaply, a far larger portion of the Web than Google, which boasts the largest online index.

The would-be Google rival says its service goes beyond prevailing search techniques that focus on Web links and audience traffic patterns and instead analyzes the context of each page and the concepts behind each user search request.

"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," Tom Costello, Cuil co-founder and chief executive, said in a statement.

Danny Sullivan, a Web search analyst and editor-in-chief of Search Engine Land, said Cuil can try to exploit complaints consumers may have with Google -- namely, that it tries to do too much, that its results favour already popular sites, and that it leans heavily on certain authoritative sites such as Wikipedia.

"The time may be right for a challenger," Sullivan says, but adds quickly, "Competing with Google is still a very daunting task, as Microsoft will tell you."

Microsoft Corp, the No. 3 US player in Web search has been seeking in vain, so far, to join forces with No. 2 Yahoo Inc to battle Google.

Cuil was founded by a group of search pioneers, including Costello, who built a prototype of Web Fountain, IBM's Web search analytics tool, and his wife, Anna Patterson, the architect of Google Inc's massive TeraGoogle index of Web pages.

Patterson also designed the search system for global corporate document storage company Recall, a unit of Australia's Brambles Ltd.

The two are joined by two former Google colleagues, Russell Power and Louis Monier.
Previously, Monier led the redesign of ecommerce leader eBay Inc's search engine and was the founding chief technology officer of two 1990s Web milestones, AltaVista and BabelFish, the first language translation site.

"They do have the talent that is used to build large, industrial-strength search engines," Sullivan says of Cuil.


Cuil clusters the results of each Web search performed on the service into groups of related Web pages. It sorts these by categories and offers various organising features to help identify topics and allow the user to quickly refine searches.

User privacy is another appeal of its approach, Cuil says. Because the service focuses on the content of the pages rather than click history, the company has no need to store users' personal information or their search histories, it says.

"We are all about pattern analysis," Patterson says. "We go over the corpus (Web pages) 12 times before we even index it."

Does size matter, once again?

Cuil has indexed a whopping 120 billion Web pages, three times more than what they say Google now indexes, Patterson said, adding the company has spent just $5 million, Google itself preemptively responded to Cuil's arrival with a blog post on Friday boasting of the growing scale of its own Web search operations.

Sullivan said he puts no stock in either company's boasts about the size of their indexes, since it has only an indirect effect on the ultimate success Web surfers have in searching.
And Cuil's privacy virtues are exaggerated, he adds.

Founded in late 2006, the Menlo Park, California-based Cuil has raised $33 million in two separate rounds: The first, for $8 million from Greylock and Tugboat Ventures, and the second for $25 million by Madrone Capital Partners.

Initially, Cuil is optimised for American English. Later this year, the company plans to enable Cuil users to perform searches in major European languages, Patterson said.
Eventually, Cuil plans to make money by running ads alongside search results, she said, but provided no further details.

Cuil is one of a number of start-ups that are looking to introduce new technology that can change the competitive dynamics of the Web search market that Google dominates.

Earlier in July, Microsoft bought Powerset, a San Francisco-based search start-up that enables consumers to use semantic techniques -- conversational phrasing instead of keywords -- to search the Web.

[VelMurugan]

New Search Engine by Ex-Google Employee

Former Google engineer Tom Costello has unveiled a new search engine claiming to offer the biggest web index with 120 billion web pages - three times more than other search engines, including Google.

A startup technology company, Cuil (pronounced COOL) is led by the husband-and-wife team of Tom Costello and Anna Patterson. Before founding Cuil, Costello researched and developed search engines at Stanford University and IBM, while Patterson was the architect of Google's large search index and led a web page ranking team.

The new challenger to Google's throne promises to offer organized and relevant results based on web page content analysis. Going beyond link analysis and traffic ranking, Cuil analyzes the context of each page and the concepts behind each query. It then organizes similar search results into groups and sorts them by category. Users are provided with a richer display of results and features such as tabs to clarify subjects, images to identify topics and search refining suggestions to guide then through the results. Check out Cuil's features to know more.

Cuil has an unconventional and interactive search page as compared to other search engines. The search results are presented like snippets on news websites with quite a bit of explanation, so that you know exactly what you're opening. This is in sharp contrast to Google, where quite often one lands up on the wrong page as the lead material is inadequate.

Check out the image below.



Moreover, users need not go through various pages to find the most relevant result, as it's all available on tabs. Our experience of Cuil was little uncertain, for when we tried to open the inside pages, we got a message saying "We'll be back soon... 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. Thanks for your patience."

In addition to these features, Cuil guarantees 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, the company said.

However, this is not the first time a start-up has attempted to compete with search giant Google. One of the most crippling problems all these start-ups face is inadequate advertising revenue. Before beginning to compete with Google, Cuil needs to find enough advertising revenue to survive in the market.

Source : TechTree

[ram]

Hi [you],

Cuil search engine takes on Google !!

A new search engine dubbed Cuil is hoping to offer a rival to the likes of Google, Yahoo and Ask.

Cuil is pronounced 'cool' and comes from an old Irish word meaning 'knowledge'.

The site has indexed 120 billion web pages, which it claims is three times more than any other search engine, and results are organised by ideas rather than just rankings. Cuil also boasts complete user privacy.

The new search engine will attempt to analyse the context of each page and the concepts behind each query, thereby grouping similar results together and sorting them by category.

These groups are divided by tabs which aim to clarify subjects, offer images to identify topics and search refining suggestions.

"The web continues to grow at a fantastic rate and other search engines are unable to keep up with it," said Tom Costello, chief executive and co-founder of Cuil.

"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."

However, it seems that the new site has been more popular than its makers had anticipated, as the servers seem to have buckled under the strain.

Many users trying to access the site are seeing an error message which reads: "We'll be back soon ..."

"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. Thanks for your patience," the notice says.

[ganeshbala]

New Search Engine Sprouts From Ex-Googlers

A startup led by former star Google engineers on Sunday unveiled a new Web search service that aims to outdo the Internet search leader in size, but faces an uphill battle to change Web surfing habits.

Cuil (pronounced "cool") is offering a new search service that the company claims can index faster and more cheaply a far larger portion of the Web than Google, which boasts the largest online index.

The would-be Google  rival says its service goes beyond prevailing search techniques that focus on Web links and audience traffic patterns and instead analyzes the context of each page and the concepts behind each user search request.

"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," Tom Costello, Cuil co-founder and chief executive, said in a statement.

 This information is already been shared by Hari.

Make sure to search the topic before posting.

[hari]

[blink]How cool is Cuil?[/blink]

Does the world need another search engine? The people behind Cuil (pronounced cool) obviously think so. They claim that their brand new search searches three times as many pages as Google and they tell us that "rather than rely on superficial popularity metrics, Cuil searches for and ranks pages based on their content and relevance."

The founders of Cuil are former Google engineers and they obviously have a fiercely competitive attitude to their former mother-ship - this line in their FAQ seems aimed at another search engine:

"What information do you keep about me?"
"None. We analyze the web, not our users. Read our Privacy Policy for details. It's short."

But getting a world which now uses "google" as a verb to change its search habits is a massive challenge. So is Cuil worth a try? I tried it, and was not immediately impressed. It looks better than Google, with images integrated into search results, and I like the option to explore by categories which you are offered with your results. But in a number of cases it offered me, well, nothing.

One was a complex inquiry relating to how you find your data usage on a mobile broadband product - Google directed me to a useful forum, Cuil said "no results".

Then I put in the surname of a senior Microsoft executive and got this :"We didn't find any results for "Courtois Microsoft". Only when I put in his full name did I receive some decent links.

Perhaps it was just me. I decided to widen my research by asking colleagues across our newsroom - all of whom are rabid searchers after truth - to try a Cuil search alongside every Google inquiry. Within minutes of sending out an e-mail, I was getting plenty of responses - most telling me that they had received this message after trying a search:

"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."

Oh dear - if you can't hook impatient people on the day you launch, they may not return. I decided to give it one last chance and put Cuil's fate in the hands of a real expert. Murray Dick is a BBC researcher who has spent a lot of time working out how journalists can use search more effectively - he runs an excellent seminar on webtools for journalists, which he's published on his personal blog.

His conclusions were kinder than mine, but not much:

    * Search term: "The speed of sound" "This particular search highlights one of Google's many tricks - giving a calculation and conversion details of the speed of sound at the top - a serious benefit over the Cuil results."

    * Search term: "Nikon d50 reviews problems". Plenty of articles on the D70 camera, but none on the D50 (which might suggest it isn't doing its job in terms of prioritising meta tags and headlines above freetext). Google however got a good review from a reputable independent source as first link.

    * Search term:"Fernando Pessoa" From the point of view of someone interested in literature, Cuil returned a wiki result, and a number of literary review-type pages, both professional and amateur. However Google (assuming the consumerist angle) brought back Amazon results as a priority (with pic), then Wiki, then various others - Google is geared more towards selling than reference research.



    * Search term: "What age is Gordon Strachan?"

      Cuil returns nothing - it doesn't seem to be able to cope with question-based queries - compared to Ask (with same query), which finds Strachan's Wiki page, and gives the results exactly (Ask being a natural language search engine, beats others at this type of query - semantic search engines aside).

So Cuil only came out on top in one out of Murray's four searches. In summary, neither Murray nor anyone else I asked to try out Cuil saw a compelling reason to switch search engines, which is a pity, because it is getting more difficult to extract useful results from Google.

Cuil has raised impressive amounts of investor cash for a start-up taking on the biggest kid on the internet block. But seeing as I had to search Google to find out about the $25 million round of investment in April - a search on Cuil for "cuill backers" returned no results - I fear those investors may not see their money back.

[NAREN]

Fetch this: new web tool challenges Google

Pitched as the world's latest, largest and swiftest search engine, Cuil was launched Monday with 120 billion pages or 'thrice' the volume of the Google index.

Described as a 'super-stealth search project', it has been founded and developed by the highly respected husband-wife duo of Stanford professor Tom Costello and former Google search architect Anna Patterson.

Originally Cuill, pronounced as cool, Irish for knowledge, has now been named 'Cuil'. A report on the web quoting the founders claimed that it is "bigger, faster and better than Google's flagship search engine in pretty much every way".

The Internet has grown by leaps and bounds over the past 15 years, speedily outpacing search engines. But Cuil is expected to search more web pages than Google and 10 times as many as the search engine of Microsoft.

Where Cuil scores over rivals is the way it indexes the web and handle queries by users. Both are costly operations, but Cuil claims to have found a way to slash those costs.

A search for dogs, for example, will return category results for "water dogs," "crossbreed", "cocker spaniel" and so on. Some of these related terms do not include the term "dog".

Similarly by clicking on New York, one would get tabbed results for recommended refinements like New York Times, New York City, New York Yankees and so on.

A search for "Harry" would throw up different tabs for "Harry Potter" and "Prince Harry of Wales". Further, the Harry Potter tab will provide more sub-links devoted to actors, Gryffindor dorm-mates and others associated with the series.

That would permit Cuil's founders to operate the search engine much more cheaply, even at Google-scale should it ever reach that point. Google incurs an expenditure of a billion dollars every year on running the infrastructure of its search business.

Cuil also works to understand how words are related. Say France - cheese - wine, to get more relevant results. This is a semantic search approach very different from Powerset's natural language approach.

Powerset uses artificial intelligence to try to grasp what sentences on a website actually mean. Cuil, by comparison, simply tries to categorise and file a web page, even if the category name doesn't appear on the site.

However, Rafe Needleman, writing on the Cuil homepage, cautioned that "it's one thing to have a nice interface and show users good results, but the size of the web index that the engine has access to matters a lot as well".

"Compared with Google's globe-spanning network of data centres, some literally set up near dams so they can tap hydro power more efficiently, Cuil's two puny data centres hosting less than 2,000 PCs total will have to run pretty fast to outpace Google's crawlers.

"As a business proposition, Cuil is obviously a big bet ... No other search engine has come close to entering the public consciousness like this. Of course, Cuil doesn't have to trounce Google on day one. It took Google quite some time to surpass Alta Vista and Yahoo in the search wars."