Google gets Cuil search rival
Written by admin on July 28th, 2008 in gadgets.
Anna Patterson may be known to some of you for creating the biggest search engine index of 30 billion pages before being snapped up along with her technology by Google in 2004. In 2006 she then left the search giant to create Cuil (pronounced “cool”).
Cuil is another search engine, but Anna along with her husband Tom Costello and two ex-Google engineers, believe it is a giant leap forward from the technology that powers Google search. For starters she claims it has an index of 120 billion pages and that it far exceeds Google’s current index total. The underlying algorithm used for searching is also very different. Google ranks pages based on their linkages, but Cuil focuses on scanning the content of an actual web page rather than the links to and from it.
Cuil also offers the user a very different search results page. Instead of a long list of links you get something that looks akin to a news site, with links spread across the breadth of a page and images used generously. There is also a set of categories relating to a search on the right hand side of the page, mousing over these expands them giving you a range of related links as well as your main results.
The search engine also caters for the privacy conscious by not logging any user data when they perform a search – something Google is well-known for and others, such as Ask.com, have tried to attract users with.
Cuil went live today and the servers are already feeling the pressure with an “unavailable” message regularly appearing. A sign of its popularity already or a lack of infrastructure?
Read more at Associated Press
Matthew’s Opinion
Using Google is so ingrained in most web users that it is hard to see them looking elsewhere. Anyone who starts a new web search knows it is going to be a slow burner and needs to account for that in the business plan and funding.
Anna Patterson’s name carries a lot of weight because of her past achievements and you can see that reflected in the US$33 million Cuil has already received in venture capital funding. If it truly is a better solution than Google or their rivals, then Cuil will see users migrate.
The search results page certainly is a refreshing change and clearly opens up a lot more opportunities for advertisers. It actually seems more user friendly because it looks like a web site rather than just a page of links. We will have to wait and see how users react to it, what do you think?
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