Menlo Park based Cuil will make a huge entrance into the already crowded search engine market with an impressive 120 billion indexed web pages. Formerly known as Cuill, the super-stealth project is the brainchild of CEO Tom Costello and VP Engineering Anna Patterson, whose search expertise have been well-acclaimed, as well as Google alumnus Russell Power.
The company seeks to differentiate their offering from the big players such as Google in the way the web is indexed and the queries handled. It boasts of a cost-effective method of providing the search engine, allowing it to scale to rival Google’s trillion known unique web pages. Cuil asserts that it has a notable superiority over others in search results by not just indexing sites based on keywords, but by understanding how words are related to each other and thus being able to offer more relevant recommendations. This semantic approach is distinct from the natural language processing (NLP) methodology of another company, Powerset.
Cuil also has a new three-column search result display with images and more extensive summary texts than other search engines. Its ‘explore by category’ tab on the right of the page shows categories of related searches for queries such as ‘dogs’, linking to specific breeds with enough context understanding as to pick out the word ‘dog’ isn’t even on the page. On top of this, the company is aiming for privacy-first with both IP addresses and cookies not kept on their servers.
The success of the company will hinge on their ability to produce excellent search results, but they have a fighting chance. Not just with the competence of their founders and the backing of investors such as Greylock, Madrone Capital Partners or Tugboat Ventures, but a clear vision on how to stand out from the crowd and make their offering an attractive alternative.
Cuil stands out amongst the competition with their skillful team of search experts in the lead and the backing of various investors. They boast of a highly cost-effective search engine that indexes websites in a much more accurate way. The way they are able to categorize a web page and understand how words are related, even without them appearing on the page, enables Cuil to return much more relevant search results with the incorporation of an ‘explore by category’ tab and images added to the traditional three column setup. The company also places a huge importance on user privacy, deleting IP addresses and cookies from their servers, so the data can’t be handed over to anyone. It remains to be seen if Cuil will significantly challenge the likes of Google in the search engine market, but this launch marks an important if not historic moment for the industry.
