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Former Google Employees Release Search Engine

Posted on: Monday, 28 July 2008, 14:00 CDT

A former Google employee unveiled a new Internet search engine on Sunday that is set to compete directly with the Web search leader.

Cuil (pronounced “cool”) is being touted as a more comprehensive and efficient way to scour the Internet. The company claims its site can index, faster and more cheaply, a far larger portion of the Web than Google, which boasts the largest online index.

Anna Patterson, her husband, Tom Costello, and two other former Google engineers - Russell Power and Louis Monier – quit Google in 2006 to explore better ways to search for information online.

Patterson was the architect of Google’s massive TeraGoogle index of Web pages. She also designed the search system for global corporate document storage company Recall, a unit of Australia's Brambles Ltd.

She and her team believe Cuil’s search index is at least three times the size of Google's index at 120 billion Web pages.

"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.

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.

Cuil believes it will outshine Google in several other ways, including its method for identifying and displaying pertinent results.

Patterson says Cuil’s method of ranking the quantity and quality of links to Web sites is different from Google’s because its 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 and its return 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.

Additionally, 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.

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 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."

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.

"Search has become as much about branding as anything else," said Gartner Inc. analyst Allen Weiner. "I doubt (Cuil) will be keeping anyone at Google awake at night."

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On the Net:

• Cuil

Source: redOrbit Staff & Wire Reports

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