www.chicagotribune.com/technology/sns-ap-google-challenger,0,7110463.story


chicagotribune.com


Ex-Google engineers introduce a new search engine called 'Cuil'


By MICHAEL LIEDTKE

AP Business Writer

6:36 AM CDT, July 28, 2008

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SAN FRANCISCO (AP) _ 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."



Copyright 2008 Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not
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