Cuil plans to overtake google.

[broneck]

Up and coming search engine hopes to overtake google.

I don't see this happening, but i'll grant that they're new and have some new bugs to work out.

http://www.cuil.com/search?q=supertalk

http://www.google.ca/search?hl=en&q=supertalk&meta=

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

Cuil 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, Cuil'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.

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

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

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

[Guest jeffvyain]

heard this on NPR this morning. then I went to their website. and it ain't google. or even close. not nearly as user friendly the way they display their search results. Great about their privacy policies and whatnot, but I'll stick with google if I actually want to find what I'm looking for.

Oh, and load time takes way too long (something I'm sure they'll fix soon).

[Spastic_Koala]

You need to turn "Safe Search" off to get results for supertalk.

[cyberPUNK]

google and the rest of the internet can go to hell as long as spankwire.com remains intact.

[dolly]

I think the results are organized in an interesting way, but they definitely aren't convenient if you're just trying to quickly find an address or something.

i don't like how your eyes have to dart around the page to see all the results, instead of just having it organized in a neat linear layout

[macuser3of5]

Terrible layout for browsing search results. Will never become a verb. Fail.

[fashiontard]

i posted a link in the next lvl thread a while ago.. dont thnk its that great but in a years time who noes

[Jkissi7]

^ same exact thing i was thinking... and just the name Cuil doesn't compete with Google ... they couldn't even mess with Yahoo

[broneck]

but it's pronounced cool guys

therefore it must be cool

brilliant marketing

(10)

[Guest jeffvyain]

"I'm trying to find a pizza place nearby"

"Just cuil it, man"

"Fuck you, I'm hungry."

[ProfMonnitoff]

i thought google and yahoo were stupid names too but they worked

but cuil, nobody even knows how the fuck to pronounce that without being told

by the way they're not a web 2.0 site so why are they doing that "1 letter in a different color" thing?

[cyberPUNK]

because they're a bunch of cunts trying to be cool.

[Spastic_Koala]

because they're a bunch of cunts trying to be cuil.

Fixed. Yay for bad puns!

[Charlie Delta]

Hahaha at the tags!

Honestly, they're going to have to do better than this if they're making claims like that...

[obstacle 1]

"I'm trying to find a pizza place nearby"

"Just cuil it, man"

"Fuck you, I'm hungry."

(10)........

[homi29]

whats in a name? Apparently alot because everyone hates this one.

I would give it 6months to a year before i count this site out. Even if it doesn't surpass google it could knock out yahoo and MSN search which both blow

[Seething Tortoise]

Name doesn't roll of the tongue as well, my gash internet connection takes longer to load it than google and the layout is messy too.

[Guest jeffvyain]

yahoo won't be taken down that easily. they've still got plenty to offer...hell, microsoft was offering $44 billion(?) to gobble up the company.

i feel sorry for the investors who poured their $33 million into this piece of shit. A black screen and a search page offering 11 results at a time spread across my screen isn't going anywhere. They need to up the useability, regardless of the latest and greatest webcrawling technologies they're patting themselves on the back for.

[DüM]

not a very good search engine

[Spastic_Koala]

not a very good search engine

Again, to get results you need to turn off "Safe Search." Not that the results will be displayed in any easy to read manner.

[Salad]

For real, not very impressive. Lame layout, looks like newspaper columns or something. Too much text.

Got the "no results" message two out of 3 times. All 3 searches on G returned numerous results.

The two searches that didn't work were "Nardis" and "1975 Honda 400 four Super Sport".

Cuil needed to sort things out before they launched this. Very poor first impression.

[DüM]

cuil reads sufu, searching sidney lo works now.

[Charlie Delta]

Well sufu is considered "Cuil!" and ofcourse they keep up to date on all things "cuil" acrross the interwebs.

Mine Gott!!!

[rome1]

just chiming in but, as everyone has already stated, super annoying layout... would be better if it loaded with text sites on lone side of the page and video or images on the other.

[homi29]

wtf

We didn’t find any results for “eric glennie”

[jeanunit]

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.

I'm impressed

[cuddlysheep]

i hope it wil be better than google, just for the name alone.

[cash]

I would give it 6months to a year before i count this site out. Even if it doesn't surpass google it could knock out yahoo and MSN search which both blow

Maybe less, I've tried a dozen times since hearing about this on the ride to work....still nothing. Best not to go to hot with your PR blitz if the fucker doesn't work.

[Corbin Law]

ahhh this is most ridiculous, people will never have a need for search engines at home, or even computers for that matter, this is almost a dumb as the automobile.

[julianREE]

cuil sucks. end of story, don't use it.