USA, San Francisco. An Associated Press reporter, Michael Liedtke, has reported that a new search engine has been launched. Also, that the inventor of Google's search engine Anna Patterson is the inventor of the new search engine which is called Cuil. Cuil is pronounced as “cool” or “kool”. Early reports indicate that the launch has been a failure.
Anna Patterson says that the new search engine is more user friendly than Google and is more valuable than Google. Exact details are not available yet. Patterson also states that she intends to enter into competition with Google and does not intend to sell her new invention! Cool Cuil.
A group of individuals which consisted of Ms. Anna Patterson, Tom Costello (Anna Patterson's husband), Russell Power (former Google engineer) and Louis Monier (another former Google) had been experimenting with newer and better search engines for some time. Now they have found the ideal search engine and have obtained $33 million venture capital to launch her new search engine. This may sound like a lot of money but for ventures like this cost can be as high as $1 to $2 billion.
Is Cuil better than Google? This question begs an answer but I cannot answer it. The inventors of Cuil believe that it is at least three times better because its index is about three times larger than that of Google. Does index size indicate that it is better? Again I cannot answer this question. Only end users can answer this question. Google stopped quantifying its index breath about three years ago. So there in no objective way of knowing Google's current index breath. At that time, three years ago, Google's catalogue was 8.2 billion Web pages.
According to current reports Cuil's search index spans 120 billion Web pages. Yes, this is many times larger than Google's 8.2 billion Web pages. I am not sure if it translates into “better” performance and usability for the end user.
Google is not conceding defeat at this time. A statement released by Ms. Katie Watson, Google spokesperson said that Google believed that its index was the largest and that its quality was superior to that of Cuil's index. Cuil disputes this.
Cuil's promised advantage is that it will not retain information about user's search engines which Google does. Privacy watchdogs and many individuals resent this violation of privacy.
Cuil intends to upstage and displace Google with superior technology which goes into the actual content of a web page instead of just focusing on the page. Consequently Cuil's results will be presented in a magazine format instead a vertical stack of data about Web links. Cuil's results will display more photographs with sidebars which may be clicked to learn more about the specific data.
NOTE of CAUTION: Cuil is not the first new comer to challenge Google. Previous challengers include Teoma (this technology became the groundwork for Ask.com), Vivisimo, Snap, Mahalo and Powerset. Powerset was purchased by Microsoft Corporation earlier this month.
In my opinion this is the first time that Google has been challenged by a “general-purpose” search engine which has been created by its former employees. These ex-employees obviously had some inside knowledge and only they know the exact reasons for advancing a new search engine. Financial advantage is probably high on their priority list. There will be other challenges in the future because Google has more than 20 thousand employees.
Good Luck Cuil.
