The murmurs about new stealth search engine Cuill (pronounced “cool”), which were barely a whisper earlier this year, are gaining strength and are starting to reverberate through Silicon Valley gatherings. Expect Powerset-like hype to begin forming around Cuill in the next few months. The company just recently put up a landing page with very basic information.
The company’s main claim is that it can index web pages significantly faster and cheaper than Google can – Cuill has told potential investors that their indexing costs will be 1/10th of Google’s, based on new search architectures and relevance methods. In some ways Cuill is the polar opposite of Powerset, which has huge indexing costs because it does a deep contextual analysis on every sentence on every web page. Powerset’s indexing costs, therefore, should be much higher per web page than Google’s.
Cuill was also founded by highly respected search experts. Husband and wife team Tom Costello and Anna Patterson were joined by Russell Power. Patterson and Power are ex-Google search experts, and Google must be fuming that their inventions were not added to Google’s intellectual property library. Costello was the founder of Xift.
Cuill met with venture capitalists, but we’re hearing that Costello and Patterson eventually self-funded the company with a $5ish million injection of capital. They now have 10-15 employees and offices in Menlo Park.
Another rumor circulating is that Google already took a shot at acquiring the company with a very healthy offer, showing that they take this potential threat seriously. And the company may have enticed at least one other senior search scientist from Google to join them recently.
Cuill is supposedly set to launch some time in 2008, although they very well might be acquired well before the public gets to see what they are up to.
Recently they has been a lot of search engine startups aiming to take Google’s place at the top of the hill. The thing most people do not realize, is Google is more than a search engine. Google is a brand, just like when you think of blowing your nose, you ask for a Kleenex, not a napkin.
Google has branded its name to get it where it is today, and I doubt anyone will be able to take over its prime spot anytime soon.
Powerset doesn’t have much buzz except for on this very blog. People talk about them — and about how they’ve failed to launch a real product to date. They also talk about how they keep launching other “secondary” products instead of the search engine. I’ve heard that they don’t even have a fully functioning search engine for internal use beyond something being applied to a few sites.
once their search engine works, they should use it to search for a better name.
imagine this dialogue:
bob: hey how’d you find out i like lobster?
alice: i cuilled you? wtf is cuilled? i don’t even know how to say that word. good thing this dialogue is typed and not spoken.
bob: i’m never speaking to you again. (leaves room)
I’ll tell you one thing very unstealthy and un-cuill about them to me, they blew onto the scene right during peak college book season and spidered the bajeezus out of our site before we noticed them, quite a busy spider and extra load when we didn’t need it (really more my fault for not seeing it sooner, not their problem). Look for ‘Twiceler’ in your logs it’s fun.
However, it does look pretty cool in terms of personnel on their site. I can’t imagine they don’t know what they’re up against at least.
Best of luck.
Google is definitely popular because of its brand name, but they also still have fairly relevant search results. Better than yahoo, and MUCH better than msn/live/whatever the hell its called.
pre google there was a new search darling every year, then google came and on top of good search primarily figured out monetisation of search. But why not a new innovation evolution curve and a real threat to G ? the problem this time around is that tearing away the ad $$$ is going to be so much harder. Maybe they can go help out IAC with their Ask strategy…
a ‘very healthy’ offer on the table…that sounds very good – it’s tough not to pass that up, considering you haven’t even launched yet
#1- Microsoft was a brand before anyone knew Google and your point is?
#6 + #8, Yeah that is true. I just don’t see ‘Cuill’ as a widely branded search giant. It has to compete with Google who has dominated the market, has extremely deep pockets, has nearly perfected its spidering system, and has been online and branded into the brains of everyone.
That is a gigantic hill that Cuill, or any other company will have to climb.
Best of luck to them!
#9 Someone has to do it! haha …
Anyone know of any actual accomplishments by Tom or Anna while at Google? I guess it doesn’t matter — being from Google is enough for people to assume you’re awesome.
“The company’s main claim is that it can index web pages significantly faster and cheaper than Google can”
But, and I say this about Mahalo, will *searches* alone really allow one to compete with Google? I mean would we still call Goog a “search-engine”? If anything it’s a massive CMS. I do very little searching lately, but I do check the news, check reader, watch YouTube, etc.
@11 – lol…well, apparently it is.
all you have to say is: i worked for google in the past…and people will be in ohh and ahh. google afterall hires the top 2% of the brains out there, so that says something if you have worked at google in the past
faster index is not an appealing.
However I do not agree that Google is a brand that is hard to beat. In the search space anybody can beat anybody as long as they provide better results. Because it is easy for user to switch to. You simply use another page.
All the brand stuff follows.
With that said, I am yet to see real search engine that is better than google. I want to quickly fast forward to 2009 to see how the search scene changes.
Last time I checked, Google don’t charge me to search, and my stocks are doing fine, so why does it matter whether they are cheaper than Google unless they want to license or sell the technology out?
Indexing faster is fine, but that is what news is for. I’ve never found Google particularly stale, unlike those jaffa cakes earlier…
Must be nice to have purchase offers before you even have a working site.
MBN!
I agree with #3
A good search engine starts with a good name..
*Google it..
*I found it on delicious
*Yahoo is a cool sound
* msn is msn..
* even enhance changed their name from AHA!
WTF is cuille? did i spell it right cuille, sounds french to me.
Yeah, the name seems easy to mispronounce. Plus like others said, I’m not sure if faster indexing is enough of a advantage. Its exciting to see all these new search engine come up though. Google can’t hold its position forever.
best of luck to cuille
Well … I still feel strongly that search needs to be turned on its head. Regular search, natural or not, is just that … regular.
#18 – Point proven by #19 haha.
If it’s “main claim is that it can index web pages significantly faster and cheaper than Google” then my main reaction is: so what?
I use a search engine to find RELEVANT results. Deliver a much higher percentage of relevant results, and I might be interested in switching. If faster indexing simply means that I might find a page or two that was added between Google indexes, making my search results 1,284,896 pages instead of 1,284,898 pages…
Well, color me underwhelmed.
Can I just say…linking companies to their Crunchbase profile is goofy. What user-centric purpose does this serve? Obviously it’s more exposure for the Crunchbase advertisers, but how pointless that those of who want to learn more have to click an additional time…
According to this 37 Signals job posting, http://jobs.37s...s.com/jobs/2055, Cuill , Inc. is a “venture-funded startup”…
BTW I think if ‘the cheaper search engine’ is going to be their differentiator, they’ve got Gigablast to beat before Google. The difference is he’s already running and has explained his architecture in an interview in ACM. It’s super-intersting.
Some of the posts in relation to this company are pretty … dumb?
Let me say this:
Google builds 10 server warehouses to process searching indexing information at a cost of around $300 Million each. So lets assume it costs $3 Billion and they need to build at least 3 of these each year somewhere around the globe. So thats $1 Billion per year.
Google acquire Cuill for lets say $100 Million – who can increase the speed of processing search information at 1/10th of the cost.
Can anyone see the connection here ?
Cost is not the problem that needs solving in search. If it was, Google would not be minting money.
You are fool if you think cost is not involved in everything – of course it is otherwise ‘google wouldn’t be minting money’ now would they ?
Cuill’s agent is Twiceler. The bot is much better behaved now as compared to a couple of months back when it disobey the robot.txt on my site.
Currently if is spidering at a good pace which does not overload my server as before. Previously it was doing 3-4 requests per second. Not something that I will like to waste my server computational power on when the search engine itself is not established.
Now since it is featured here, I guess I can unblock the 3 different IPs that Twiceler is coming from.
Best of luck Cuill!
@28 “You are a fool…” wow pretty damn sure of yourself aren’t you? Larry is right, cost is not the problem to be solved. Keeping operating costs down is a concern for every business of course, but its not the game changer here. The only thing that matters in search are the search results. As the end user, it doesn’t matter to me how much it’s costing Cuill (crappy name) to compete with Google. The only thing that is going to get people to switch are better results. Cuill is attacking the problem from the wrong end.
@30 – haha you think reducing the cost of search is not a “game changing” play. You have got to be joking. It’s not a feasible business strategy to “solve the search paradigm” yet have an unlimited upper end of cost. It’s just not sustainable.
So “no” I not sure of myself, but I am sure that if Google acquired a company that reduced the cost of indexing by 1/10th, then it could reinvest the capital back into R&D and therefore spend more resources on solving the search problem more than any other company out there.
Does that make sense to you or would you like me to re-explain it ?
“pre google there was a new search darling every year, then google came and on top of good search primarily figured out monetisation of search. But why not a new innovation evolution curve and a real threat to G ? the problem this time around is that tearing away the ad $$$ is going to be so much harder. Maybe they can go help out IAC with their Ask strategy…”
Google didn’t invent their monetization strategy — they had NONE. They stole it from Overture and later paid a settlement.
Culli hashes combinations of words to reduce the index size. It works well for large queries, not well at all for short queries. It’s a hack at reducing operational costs, not particularity at increasing relevancy.
GOOG’s probably just jealous the Anna took their cash and is now doing cooler stuff than GOOG is doing internally.
More and more complex software to make sense of all those indexed words, however you end up with the mad scientist’s duct-taped nightmare, literally a Velcro-taped nightmare in Google’s case, as hard as they try to organize the “AI” attempting to comprehend our activities online, the real threat isn’t another engine with new technology, it is human expression, more complex, richer, advancing every day.
We already have this in Vista!
http://fakestev...er.blogspot.com
No one mentioned that google made the lions share of cash from AdSense — without which, they’d probably be gone now, or a fraction of their current size.
So, making a better search engine than google, imo, is pretty pointless other than as a fun-fun scientific exercise to see whose got the biggest crystal balls.
So brilliant they are stoopid.
Good name… no wonder what their marketing guys were doing during their french class at University … it almost sound like “bollocks”
@ #37… Seconded!
Google is much more than a search now. Most people use Google products for a number of differing services. The world wide brand of Google is up there with Nike and McDonalds. I bet all these search start-ups are wanting to be acquired by Google before they even launch. What better way to do this than by getting the rumor mill going.
‘Just Cuill it’ does have a certain ring to it, though.
You mean it’s not “kweel”?
FYI, Cuill created all sorts of issues for my site over about a two week period. I eventually had to block their robot and domain…
Jay … how does Cuill identify their spider?
I don’t think Google has anything to worry about. One of the other reasons they became the main search option was the word free. Everything is free with Google, whereas Excite, Yahoo, etc. all wanted to start charging.
It’ll be interesting when and if people start installing adblock plus in mass. I still don’t understand why Microsoft doesn’t ship an ad blocker by default.
Yeah, I’ve been seeing that bot hit my sites for a while now. They identify with useragent “cuill” can’t remember if there is a version number or anything, but it’s easy to spot.
What is really the new technology of Cuill/twiceler (which seem to be the name of the bot…) and what is meant here by ’stealth mode’??? In the last days our server broke down because we had 3 times our normal traffic. Why that: We were visited by twiceler/Cuill; they produiced till 8000 visits per day. Why that? They acted as Mozilla 5.0 in order to be rated as human visitors…..a new interpretation of stealth mode……
A search engine that destroys the sites the are indexing…. really a new invention. Happy to hear, the will be aquired by google. there they can learn something!
I think there may be a few misconceptions about this company and their technology, based on what I can tell. (I have no inside information but know something about search architectures.)
First, Michael’s comparison of powerset and cuill in terms of efficiency is probably comparing apples and oranges. My best guess is that cuill does not focus on being more efficient in creating and maintaining an index (i.e., crawling and index build), but that their index itself is structured in a way that supports more efficient query processing afterwards. So this is not about how much resources are used to generated a good index (which is not really the main system bottleneck in a large search engine), and so the remark about the deep sentence analysis done by powerset may not be relevant. (In fact, cuill might also use extra resources to analyze the data in order to build such a better index.)
Secondly, yes, it is difficult to compete with google in terms of brand name. But the company might be highly valuable to a competitor (Yahoo, MSFT, Ask) for infrastructure reasons, which may make it worthwhile for google to buy it first.
As for the twiceler issues, this is fairly normal at the launch – crawling is quite tricky and I suspect their emphasis is not really on crawling though they need data to prove the concept.
in ICQ style it reads “C U Ill”
#30-
It is, in fact, NOT about better search results at all. It is about traffic, which is about brand, which is about distribution agreements that expand the brand.
Look at MSFT, good was always good enough. Still is. It is a shitty op system and until 5 years ago you couldn’t even find a miss-filed doc. Not until GOOG did it for you.
It will take far more than better search results to unseat google.
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