Ex Google and Stanford team launch Cuil search engine

Posted at: 4:45pm 28th July 2008 by Ben Hardwidge

Apparently pronounced ‘cool,’ the new search engine promises an index with three times as many web pages as any other search engine

With Google’s seemingly unshakeable ubiquity, it’s difficult to believe that there used to be loads of search engines from which to choose when the Web started out. However, a crack team of search experts who used to work for Google and Stanford University have decided to take on the monopoly of the world’s most famous search engine, with a brand new search engine called Cuil.

This is apparently an old Irish word that means ‘knowledge’ and, handily enough, it’s also pronounced ‘cool,’ although this factor also has a touch of the embarrassing Dad about it. The team behind Cuil claims that the search engine has the ‘biggest Web index’ and has ‘120 billion web pages,’ which it says is ‘three times more than any other search engine.’

Cuil’s method of searching and prioritising results is also different from Google’s. Cuil says that the search engine ranks results by content, rather than popularity, and analyses the ‘context of each page and the concepts behind each query,’ while giving you a selection of other groups of search results in similar categories. So, for example, a search on ‘Custom PC’ also brought up groups of search results for British Computer Magazines and Home Computer Magazines, among others.

As well as this, Cuil also promises to protect your privacy, and insists that it ‘does not keep any personally identifiable information on users or their search histories.’  The new search engine was the brainchild of Tom Costello, who worked at both Stanford and IBM, and his wife Anna Patterson, who was the architect of Google’s search index. The couple developed Cuil with Russell Power, who was one of Patterson’s colleagues at Google.

However, Cuil hasn’t got off to particularly good start. We’ve been experimenting with various searches on Cuil today, and more often than not it simply returns no results (see the picture below); the Cuil servers are obviously hitting overload on launch day. However, when it works, it has quite a different layout from Google, with a frame-based selection of results, including pictures, rather than just a list.

You can try out Cuil for yourself here. Have a go, and tell us whether you’re impressed, or whether you’re going to stick with Google for the moment.