Cuil is a new search engine started by engineers from Google Inc. and other tech giants is launching a search engine that claims to cover three times as many Web pages as Google.
The startup, Cuil Inc., plans to launch its product (www.cuil.com) Monday and aims to deliver better results than other major search engines by searching across more Web pages and studying them more accurately. The site’s results page resembles an online magazine — a different look and feel from search juggernaut Google’s.
Cuil’s founders say the new search engine covers as many as three times the number of Web pages as Google. Cuil aims to deliver better results than other major search engines by searching through more Web pages and studying pages more accurately.
“You can’t be an alternative search engine and smaller,” said Anna Patterson, Cuil co-founder and president, and one of the engineers who helped build Google’s search index. “You have to be an alternative and bigger.”
Cuil claims to be able to search across 120 billion Web pages, compared with Google’s 40 billion. Patterson says Cuil has developed a faster and better way to index Web pages that relies of fewer machines. Analyst Greg Sterling says the strong skills of Cuil’s founders, which includes Patterson’s husband Tom Costello, who built search engine technology for IBM and was on the research faculty at Stanford University, and the fact that the company has already built such a large search engine from scratch strengthens Cuil’s chances of competing over the long term.
In addition to looking at the popularity of a Web page, Cuil also analyzes the concepts on the page and their relationships — grouping similar results under different menus. A Cuil search for “Bruce Springsteen,” for example, pulls up a section for results on the artist and a section for results pertaining to tickets.
A search on Google for “Bruce Springsteen” pulls up similar results — including the same homepage and some fan pages — but displays them in one long list of links. Google doesn’t comment on how many Web pages it searches, but a company spokeswoman said the search giant welcomes “competition that stimulates innovation and provides users with more choice.”
Cuil eventually plans to make money through advertising, although the service won’t display any ads at launch. Ms. Patterson said the company hasn’t decided whether to sell advertising itself or whether to partner with a third party. It has developed various mock-ups that allow users to collapse ads or to scroll through them, she said.
Cuil said it won’t collect personal information about its users, such as the addresses of their computers and their individual search histories — although it does track the terms people search for overall. While all major search engines have taken steps to cut back on the time they store data related to individual searchers and to make the data more anonymous, Ms. Patterson said Cuil can stop collecting information about individuals’ behavior altogether because its algorithms rely more heavily on analyzing the content of a particular Web page than on the popularity of the page.
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