A former Google search architect, Anna Patterson, along with her husband have introduced Cuil, pronounced “cool”, which launches on Monday.  The new search engine has been pitched as bigger, faster, and better than Google’s flagship search engine in pretty much every way.  Anna Patterson joins fellow former Google employee Russell Power, who together were key architects in designing Google’s search engine, to launch their own version that aims at bringing a new perspective and way of analyzing and compiling webpages to the game.

With an index of over 120 billion sites, they’re arguably one of the most comprehensive search engines on the web beginning from day one, according to the Washington Post.  Much of the “secret sauce” of Cuil is in the way they index the web and handle actual searches by users.  Both are costly to scale, and Cuil claims to have found a way to massively reduce those costs. This should allow 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.

Rather than assigning priority to pages based on inbound links as Google does (”Pagerank”), Cuil analyzes the content of Web pages to divide their relevance to a search query.  What this means, in the real world, is that Cuil results are automatically categorized. When you search for a common name, for example, Cuil will give you a results page where results for different individuals with that name are grouped under tabs. It will also break out sub-topics related to each name. In Cuil’s canned demo, if you search for “Harry,” there are different tabs for “Harry Potter” and “Prince Harry of Wales.”  On the Harry Potter tab, you’ll get further sub-links devoted to actors, and so on.  It’s based on separate beliefs that search engines should have a more human touch and act accordingly, rather than relying on simple algorithms. 

Another potential advantage of the context-based search is that it allows Cuil searches to be more respectful of user privacy. Unlike Google, which simply has to track every single click to refine its index, Cuil’s context-based search does not. In practice, the distinction may be moot because Cuil will need to track clicks to see if their results are actually working for people, but it could serve as a marketable distinction nonetheless. 

I don’t know about you, but I’ve heard the claim of search engine startups that say they will outweigh Google in the long-run and that their search engines use better technology and ranking systems.  But, so far nothing seems to have made even the slightest ripple in the monopoly that is Google.  Maybe it was just going to take Google employees themselves to come up with something bigger and better.

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Entry was posted on Sunday, July 27th, 2008 at 11:58 pm under Google, Internet.

Read more entries by Justin Montgomery.
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