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A start-up led by former star Google engineers have unveiled a new web search service that aims to compete with existing search engines.
Cuil (pronounced “cool”) is offering a new search service at http://www.cuil.com that the company claims can index, faster and more cheaply, a far larger portion of the web than Google, which boasts the largest online index.
The would-be Google rival says its service goes beyond prevailing search techniques that focus on Web links and audience traffic patterns and instead analyzes the context of each page and the concepts behind each user search request.
“Our significant breakthroughs in search technology have enabled us to index much more of the Internet, placing nearly the entire Web at the fingertips of every user,” Tom Costello, Cuil co-founder and chief executive, said in a statement.
Danny Sullivan, a web search analyst and editor-in-chief of Search Engine Land, said Cuil can try to exploit complaints consumers may have with Google - namely, that it tries to do too much, that its results favour already popular sites, and that it leans heavily on certain authoritative sites such as Wikipedia.
“The time may be right for a challenger,” Mr Sullivan says, but adds quickly: “Competing with Google is still a very daunting task, as Microsoft will tell you.”
Microsoft has been seeking in vain, so far, to join forces with Yahoo to battle Google.
Cuil was founded by a group of search pioneers, including Mr Costello, who built a prototype of web fountain, IBM's Web search analytics tool, and his wife, Anna Patterson, the architect of Google's massive TeraGoogle index of Web pages.
Cuil clusters the results of each Web search performed on the service into groups of related web pages. It sorts these by categories and offers various organizing features to help identify topics and allow the user to quickly refine searches.
Founded in late 2006, the Menlo Park, California-based Cuil has raised $33 million in two separate rounds: The first, for $8 million from Greylock and Tugboat Ventures, and the second for $25 million by Madrone Capital Partners.
