Search News Desk

The Associated Press reported this morning the launch of Cuil. IMHO, as much as the search results are displayed on a slick and "cool" page, these guys have little or no chance of competing with Google, but there's a real chance they could be bought by Microsoft before the end of this week for 500 bucks. What Microsoft does with it is another matter.

I played around with Cuil to check out its search results this morning, and was not impressed. Cuil does not have the algorithms to compete with Google. For example, my search on the word "virtualization" spits out results from sites I never heard of. The only two familiar sites were VMware and the Virtualization Conference. I don't know where they found the associated images to the search results either.

My opinion of Cuil is that the wives of these ex-Googlers got too greedy with their founders' historical financial success and whipped their husbands to do better than Sergey and Larry. Cuil is very slow, and the results are inconsistent once you pass the slick(er) look of what you see. Well, Google page design is so ugly anyway, it doesn't take too much to beat them in the design department. Kids, get the check from Ballmer and move on.

Here is the AP story that broke the news.

"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."

Continued...