Menlo Park based Cuil will launch later this evening with an index of 120 billion web pages, making them arguably the most comprehensive search engine on the web (Google doesn’t disclose the size of their index, although they claim to know about a trillion unique web pages) (Update: see our very early testing here). They’ve also dropped one of the “l’s” from their name - previously the company was “Cuill.” Either way, it’s pronounced “cool.”
The super-stealth search project was founded by highly respected search experts. Husband and wife team Tom Costello (CEO) and Anna Patterson (VP Engineering) were joined by Russell Power. Patterson and Power are also ex-Google employees, and the company has been the subject of intense speculation over the last couple of years.
Much of the secret sauce of Cuil is in the way they index the web and handle actual queries by users. Both are costly to scale, and Cuil claims to have found a way to massively reduce those costs. That allows them to run the search engine a lot cheaper, even at Google-scale should it ever reach that point. By some estimates, Google spends a billion dollars a year to run the back end infrastructure of it’s search business.
Cuil also claims to have better search results than Google and others based on how they index websites. They do not simply catalog keywords on a site and then rank the site based on its importance. They also work to understand how words are related (France - cheese - wine, for example), to return more relevant results to users. This is a semantic approach to search, but very different from Powerset’s natural language approach. Powerset uses artificial intelligence to try to understand what sentences on a website actually mean. Cuil, by comparison, simply tries to properly categorize and file a web page, even if the category name doesn’t appear on the site.
That means users search the same way they always have, but Cuil will try to return better results via refinements in a “explore by category” module to the right of results. A search for dogs, for example, will return category results for “water dogs,” “crossbreed,” “cocker spaniel,” etc. Some of these related terms do not include the term “dog.”
Cuil is experimenting with a new type of search interface as well. Results are shown in three columns and contain an image and more summary text than existing search engines. In addition to refinement by category, Cuil will recommend related searches via tabs across the top of search results. A search for New York, for example, also has tabbed results for recommended refinements like New York Times, New York City, New York Yankees, etc.:
Cuil also says that they will put user privacy at the top of their business objectives. User IP addresses are not recorded to their servers, they say, and cookies are not used to associate a computer with queries. The data is simply dumped as it is created. That means user data cannot be turned over to others, whether its via blind stupidity or lawsuits.
Cuil has raised $33 million over two rounds of financing from Greylock, Madrone Capital Partners and Tugboat Ventures.
I’m still seeing the “Search. We’re working on it.” page.
Yeah I see that page too. Wrote about it more on my blog. I mean with $33 million in funding and a panel of ex Google staff, I reckon they could do ok…
Vince (HongKongWong.Com)
http://hongkongwong.com/2008/0.....r-cuilcom/
Even i am getting the same thing . Search. We’re working on it.
But anyway, just had a look at the TEAM
Lets see how well they present their search results. Shear number of pages indexed might not matter much.
Ah finally some truly interesting search news. Now “this” is one I’ve been waiting for. Can’t wait to see it.
I like how their “About” page is broken: http://www.cuil.com/info/
Looks nice. First of all — thank you for choosing black as the background instead of white. That will save a lot of energy if Cuil ever becomes as big as Google.
Secondly, it’s FAST. Nice work. But I would prefer to see more results per page by default, or have a way to scroll without having to click the next-page link.
The summarization tabs along the top are good and appear to be pretty accurate.
The right summarization concept clusters are interesting — they don’t seem to be very comprehensive, but they do provide some interesting related links for drilling in further. It is a bit hard to understand what the relationship to the present query is in some cases — are they showing related links, see also links, sub-concepts, super-concepts or something else?
I would like the site to have a link explaining the technology — Basically answer: “What is so cool about Cuil?”
It is nice — but appears to be just another search engine — but I’m sure there is more under the hood. I would like to know more.
Black is not more power saving than white. This was true for CRT, but now with LCD, actually black takes a little more energy, since the energy is needed to power the panels that hide the light (to produce black), the lamp behind, which works all the time, takes most of the energy anyway (which is much less than CRT).
Yep. Its up now.
One thing i like here is the way they have put up results, breaking away from G/Y/M . But it wil take time to get used to this.
Lame name and lamer search results. I did a search for “Django Model Reference” which should’ve given me the page from Django’s docs titled that.
First on the list of MSN, Yahoo, and Google:
http://www.google.com/search?c.....l+referenc
http://search.yahoo.com/search.....p;ei=UTF-8
http://search.live.com/results.....;form=QBLH
All cuil has is some crappy pages from their bug tracking site. Nobody cares how many pages you index if you can’t give them the site that they want. I’m sure 90% of searches relate to 10% of the internet.
Terrible name too. I dig their front page design, but they don’t deliver in anything else.
I’m sure 90% of searches relate to 10% of the internet.
great statement.
So how does the ranking work on the results page? Presumably #1 is top-left… but does it then sort by column or by row? I guess since you can select to view by 2 or 3 columns, it must be columns. Interesting that it returns 11 results per page, if you don’t include the Explore by Category.
Should be column. Row wise doesn’t make sense.
More thoughts…
I gather part of their secret sauce is the size of their index. So I guess Size Does Matter after all? One thing I also noticed is the size of their blurbs — they are too big. I would rather see shorter blurbs and fit more blurbs per page.
I love the layout though — really pretty, magazine-style look and feel.
Is there an advanced search page somewhere? How to search for all pages within a domain for example?
It’s notable that one of the guys from the IBM WebFountain project is involved — does this imply that they will be doing things related to text-mining and the semantic web in the future?
Nova: Are you sure magazine-style look is actually good for search? I like the way they try to offer images along the text when they can but I don’t really think it works very well with the magazine format - it is good to read news but I guess it will become too tiresome when you are a heavy searcher. I actually like the longer blurbs that they offer but I don’t see a reason for them not to offer one-column view if they offer 2 and 3 columns anyway.
Fails the Jaguar test, I think it still needs some work.
Just tried it, and based on my first search it is AWFUL.
I searched for “shultzys”, a Seattle restaurant.
The homepage (www.shultzys.com) doesn’t show up.
6 of the 11 first page results are spam-blogs. 2 links to Twitter. 2 links to the same empty wiki page that someone created. And one link to Yelp, but in the wrong city so there’s no information there.
0 for 11. That’s an “F” in my book.
I search for olympics start date on Google and Cuil and Cuil results are terrible but all of Google’s are relevant.
I love it personally but let’s be serious… even if their product is x1000 better than google, they still won’t be google. I mean, Google is more of a brand than McDonalds.
Not impressed with my first search, I searched for “Black Bear” easy enough, right?
But I got a page saying no search results, then adding an “s” to “bear” which they recommend brings up a bunch of college sport team results.
Thats not a good search engine, its just stupid.
A search for my name put me in a porno context with an image of a naked girl. The name of the video was “dirty movie”, and the html title tag was “dirty movie on vimeo”. Which was not a pornographic video. Cuil matched a thumbnail image from movieon.com with a man and a woman having sex. This is something I dont want my name associated with.
Second, I did a search, then hit search again on the same keyword and it brought back 0 results. Took about five more clicks to get it to b ring up results again. Last but not least the about page (http://www.cuil.com/info/) is not found.
Search results need to be in a vertical list, this just seems messy and overwhelming tbh.
other than that, the results are pretty good
Searched for my name. Not as comprehensive as Googles’. So what if they can do the same thing with less? If their results are not one magnitude better, I doubt they have any chance to unseat the well entrenched incumbent. Instead of competing with google head on, they should invent a new category of search and be the #1 in that category…
I did a search for iphone 3G and I was not really impressed: apple’s iphone 3G page was not even on the first page. In comparison, the Google results look much better. I think that they need a little more time to cook up their algorithms.
VERY interesting news… finally a search engine that could possibly take Google on a run for its money. However, it’ll be tough to take down Google, even with better technology because search = “google” in the minds of Internet users.
just tried it out…not nearly as good as google
The location-specific results seem to be very bad. For example, Concord Provisions is a store in my town. Cuil doesn’t see their site, but Google has it at #1. Same for Sorrento’s Pizzeria, and a small web company near me, SchoolPulse. Apparently their index just went more in depth on the same old sites, and failed to go get obscure ones.
tired it
search term - plumber
results were a bunch of google ads in a cpc format with detailed text so small its hard to read.
not seeing the innovaton
same here — results v. google not great…
I like the navigation suggestions and graphics but don’t dig the big page summaries and am not stoked on the results. Did a search for “vonage” and got no search results but got suggestions for Vonage Phone, Vonage VoIP, Vonage Internet, etc. Wth? Can’t find anything on the tubes for just vonage?
I am live blogging this right now.
http://tinyurl.com/CUILNEWSLIVE
I tried it out and so far, in my opinion, it’s terrible. Perhaps my experience was poor because I searched for common terms in my most popular niche but as far as I know my website, which ranks very well for a number or terms in Google, isn’t even in their index.
They’re touting the size of their index yet nearly all of the terms I’ve searched for have very poor results. I hope it improves once it opens to the public but it less something major changes I can’t say I’ll ever use it again.
They don’t even list themselves when you search for “cuil” …
Hmmm. I searched for “Hardest Easy Geometry Problem”. Google says there are about 57000 hits. Many have that exact phrase. Cuill returns nothing.
Mike. Type in techcrunch and compare it to googles results. You results on cuil are horrible. I know we have to give Cuil a chance.
interesting how they display their search results… http://blabtech.blogspot.com
Cool. I like that they have the balls to do this and the product seems to have legs. Good luck.
Cuil looks like a promising new engine. The methods for photo choice need work, though. I did a vanity search on my name; Cuil seems to think I’m Will Wright, designer of The Sims and Spore. (I’m not.) Other entries in the same search had photos of total strangers. The categories were approximately correct — good job — but there was room for a lot of improvement. I’ll be interested to follow the engine’s development, and to see how many people start thinking I’m Will Wright.
I searched for Question Mania, and unlike on Google, I got a long list of irrelevant trivia books.
Nice site design, but the search results aren’t as good as Google’s. I don’t care about the index size, relevance matters more.
This may turn out to be the Google killer every one was waiting for - in the early days, Google and AllTheWeb became popular among Geeks because of their massive indexes for that time
I’m not sure total volume of pages indexed is that relevant. I’d think that most web content is crap and that Google indexes 90% of what’s relevant to the vast majority of people. I’m not sure that going into the uber long tail of search equals a better search engine.
Also, people are used to eye scrolling top to bottom. I wonder if they picked their search result layout based on usability research or just to be different.
A crazy thought, what if Google and Cuil put their minds together and create a superstar search engine? maybe not.. http://blabtech.blogspot.com
My video is almost uploaded. It shows the Cuil JIT compiler failing.
TL - http://tinyurl.com/CUILNEWSLIVE
nothing special there except using ex-googler as a big hype… yes im skeptical as always as the industries does.
They might have a lot of pages indexed but the results are absolute crap
I really like the look, but I didn’t get nearly as good of search results as from google. Therefore, why would I use it??
I like the horizontal displays of results, but I just don’t see how this is going to be a google killer for a while (if ever).
Cuil.com delivers results fast, sorted by category, and I must say presentation is way better than Google. We finally may have a challenger!
I like the privacy features, it was about time our IPs and cookies were not glued to our search!
Wishing them the best.
Joseph–
You are coming across a hack… read the rest of the thread. The ONLY thing this company has right is the privacy.
Jb.
I am quite impressed.
Their results are very good (and relevant) for people search.
I’d be more open minded instead of comparing them to Google and dissing them from day one.
I am sure they will get better with more usage of teh site.
I wish them good luck.
True, I hope they succeed, they probably just need a chance.. http://blabtech.blogspot.com