Cuil comes out of Stealth - an Update
Cuil writes in:
Cuil, a technology company pioneering a new approach to search, unveils its innovative search offering, which combines 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, 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 former colleague Russell Power, 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.
Summary of Cuil’s features:
• Biggest Internet search engine – Cuil has indexed 120 billion Web pages, 3X more than any other search engine
• Organized results – Cuil’s magazine-style layout separates results by subject and allows further search by concept or category
• Different results – Unlike other search engines, Cuil ranks results by the content on each page not its popularity
• Complete privacy protection – Cuil does not keep any personally identifiable information on users or their search histories
July 28th, 2008 at 9:07 am
Works quickly and is handsome. It doesn’t have the nice feature of, “Did you mean?” I tried “amyotrophic lateral sclerosis” but misspelled and it insisted that I spell it utterly correctly before I got any results.
Some of the results are a little quirky, like listings for articles from 1998 and 2005 as the first options. That is pretty stale stuff.
And in “Explore by Category” I got the bizarre option of, “Cultural Revolution People.” That may have been because Mao Tse Tung is said to have had ALS (although that is speculative). But Mao wasn’t given as an option–only his minions.
Promising, but needs work.
July 28th, 2008 at 2:35 pm
Hello,
Seems like an interesting engine.
Where would we leave a comment to let you all know about our search engine. tyrols.com. It has a very small database updated by free software on the site. User’s of the software actually build it. But the images, video, and business results are somewhat unique. The business results show addresses and phone numbers. The shopping results show any web site with a price relating to the topic. More info in the ‘press’ room at tyrols.com/press.
Thanks.
Scott
July 28th, 2008 at 3:50 pm
It’s a promising site, but I’ve been having some problems with it.
It does a great job of breaking down very broad subject matters, but does very poorly on very specific results.
For example, “necktie” brought back over 400,000 results. But, “How to tie a necktie” brought back nothing.
The statement that they’re bigger than Google is a pretty lofty claim and probably the reason so many sites are being rather harsh on them. But, on the other hand, that claim is why they’re getting so many reviews in the first place.
It’s a good search engine, especially for only being less than 24hrs old.
July 28th, 2008 at 6:04 pm
I am brand new to the world of search engines. I had no idea there were so many out there. So, it’s ironic that since I always go to Google to “google”, that a new “bigger and better” search engine named “Cuil” would be launched. I will have to sit on my opinion for awhile. Since I am not savvy, I can only assume that it’s slow due to EVERYBODY wanting to “cuil.”
July 28th, 2008 at 9:19 pm
Sounds like ASE should create a great debate: Cuil FAIL vs Cuil ROCKS. Fascinating that there is so much energy about this.
August 4th, 2008 at 4:01 am
Apparently Cuil was not quite ready for launch during the first day or two - many medium long tail queries did not return results at all, and even general queries returned way fewer results than they should have considering Cuil’s claims of having indexed so many pages already. They did improve somewhat afterward, however, and seem to be picking up more results and increasing relevance as more people have been testing out the engine.
In the long run, I hope they get things together and perform well enough to compete with the major search engines and then maybe do some advertising. I would like to see more serious competitors to Google in order to hold their power in check and encourage more transparency overall.
August 4th, 2008 at 1:55 pm
Cuil is definitely going for it, but it’s hard to imagine them doing anything but incremental changes to what Google’s done. And even that would take years of effort.
Me.dium.com has taken a different tack. We have a full web index, but we change the results based on the surfing activity of our user base (now over 2,000,000). It’s in alpha, but I’d be curious to hear your thoughts. http://me.dium.com/search
August 5th, 2008 at 3:21 pm
I checked it out. Seems kind of “ok”. Didn’t think it was too user-friendly because the tabs were not consistent. Neither were the pictures. But it did provide some older stuff that I forgot was around :). Overall, I think they have some work to do. But it, like most search engines I’ve tried, evolve over time. Given the chance, perhaps they will too.
August 8th, 2008 at 10:23 am
Tested cuil. I looked for Advanced Search button or Help on Search button.
Did not find any.
My problem:
How can I get only articles where I have the exact string “WORD1 WORD2″ and not articles where I have the words WORD1 and WORD2 but not the string “WORD1 WORD2″ ?
Putting words within “”does not help: “” seem ignored.