Mountain View, California — In an attempt to further smarten up its search technology, search engine behemoth Google has finally acquired the remaining pending patent applications of Cuil, a defunct search engine once extolled as a prospective Google killer.
Back in 2008, a search engine called Cuil went live with great expectations from many that it would rival Google in technological know-how and create some competition for the search engine. Those hopes were propelled in part by the fact that search engine was started by former Google employees Anna Patterson and Russell Power, a co-founder from IBM, Tom Costello, and they were also joined by Altavista founder and ex-googler Louis Monier as well.
Interestingly, when Cuil was launched, it apparently had within its index more that three times as many Web pages as Google, and ten times as many as Microsoft. It promised not to retain information about searchers past search histories or surfing patterns as a way of distinguishing itself from Google. Bloomberg News tagged it as one of the most successful startups of 2008, and there were some real high hopes that the new search engine would rival Google.
However, things quickly diminished for Cuil over stirred controversy concerning the abrupt departure of a cofounder. Suddenly, just 2 years later, its servers were out of service. Though it may not be dead completely, however. News comes today (via Bill Slawski), that Google has acquired 7 of Cuil’s remaining patent applications as mentioned below:
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Apparatus and Method for Displaying Search Results with a Variety of Display Paradigms
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Apparatus and Method for Displaying Search Results Using Tabs
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Apparatus and Method for Displaying Search Results Using Stacks
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Apparatus and Method for Displaying Search Results with Configurable Columns and Textual Summary Lengths
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Apparatus and Method for Displaying Search Results with an Associated Anchor Area
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Apparatus and Method for Displaying Search Results with Various Forms of Advertising
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Apparatus and Method for Displaying Search Results with a Menu of Refining Search Terms
Furthermore Slawski, reports that Cuil’s remaining seven pending patents were allocated to Google with an execution date of Feb. 4, 2011, though they were not registered at the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office database until Feb. 14, 2012.
These pending patents tend to focus primarily upon search interfaces, such as how multiple tabs would be presented for query terms, different types of dropdowns, and the ability to refine searches based on related aspects, according to the blog report.
Moving forward, the most important difference between Cuil and Google was its ranking system. Rather than assigning priority to pages based on inbound links as Google does (“Pagerank”), Cuil analyzed the content of Web pages to define their relevance to a search query. In other words, Cuil results were automatically categorized.
Apparently, the record does not disclose the financial terms of the transfer, but SEO By The Sea mentions that Cuil co-founder Anna Patterson returned to Google in 2010 as the Director of Google Research.