San Francisco — A budding firm led by former star Google engineers on Monday revealed a rival Web search service called, Cuil (pronounced “cool”), intends to prove that its search technology is cooler than that of the reigning king of search, Google in size, and claiming it to be an improved version of the world’s most popular Web-scouring tool, but faces an uphill battle changing Web surfing habits.
The new search engine Cuil, launched for business on Monday, boasts that it can index 120 billion Web pages, “three times more than any other search engine,” faster and more cheaply.
“On the facade, the new search engine Cuil seems to be the anti-Google — it greets its visitors under the shade of black background with an unequivocal promise of privacy.”
Founded by husband-and-wife team Tom Costello and Anna Patterson, a search-engine researcher from Stanford University and a Google technical lead, respectively, Cuil intends to rank the relevance of search results by content analysis rather than by popularity. It has an obvious pinch at Google, which treats Web links as popular votes in weighing Web page relevance for a given query.
“Our team approaches search differently,” said Patterson, president and COO of Cuil, in a statement. “By leveraging our professionalism in search architecture and relevance methods, we have built a more efficient yet richer search engine from the ground up. The Internet has grown and we think it is time search did, too.”
But if Cuil expects to overtake Google, it is probably in for a tough fight. Google is about much more than search these days, and its whole system is designed to keep users inside its family of products.
The would-be Google contender 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 discoveries 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.
“We have created new architecture and algorithms that can handle the rapid growth of the Internet and organize results that reflect its enormous complexity.”
Cuil states that unlike Google, which seemingly ignores seldom visited or obscure websites in its index, Cuil does not discriminate and has packed 120 billion Internet pages in its index.
“Size matters because many people use the Internet to find information that is of interest to them, even if it is not popular,” Cuil said.
As Cuil’s founders explain it, the search engine moves beyond today’s search techniques of link analysis and traffic ranking to analyze the context of each page and the concepts behind each query. It then organizes similar search results into groups and sorts them by category. Cuil displays results and offers organizing features, such as tabs to clarify subjects, images to identify topics, and search-refining suggestions.
“Cuil appears to be quite flexible about many aspects of the product. They have built a back end with a large index and a different approach to search ranking. But the company, somewhat looks to be agnostic about how all that is presented,” said Greg Sterling, principal analyst at Sterling Market Intelligence. “I am sure we will see changes and refinements and experiments with the interface.”
Sterling said there is an opportunity to develop a better mousetrap, but Cuil has some hurdles to jump, primarily consumer behavior. Indeed, the test with new technologies is whether people will try it — and whether they will find enough value to try it again. One of the reasons Yahoo, Microsoft and Ask have struggled against Google is because it is difficult to change user behavior, he said.
Danny Sullivan, another Web search analyst and editor-in-chief of Search Engine Land, said Cuil can make an effort to exploit complaints consumers may have with Google — namely, that it tries to do too much, that its results favor already popular sites, and that it leans heavily on certain authoritative sites such as Wikipedia.
“The time may be right for a challenger,” Sullivan says, but adds quickly: “Competing with Google is still a very daunting task, as Microsoft will tell you.”
Microsoft Corp., the No. 3 U.S. player in Web search has been seeking in vain, so far, to join forces with No. 2 Yahoo Inc. to battle Google.
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.
On the other side of Google’s popularity, the company records information about its users and their searches to improve the user experience and to deliver more relevant search results and ads, whereas, Cuil remembers nothing.
Cuil’s most assuring privacy policy actually promises privacy: It states “When you search with Cuil, we do not collect any personally identifiable information, period. We have no idea who sends queries: not by name, not by IP address, and not by cookies. Your search history is your business, not ours.”
Cuil is one of the promising start-ups that are looking to introduce new technology that can change the competitive dynamics of the Web search market that Google dominates.
However, the challenge that Cuil is confronted with is much greater than developing a better search engine, said Tom Austin, a Gartner fellow and chief of research in software.
“If you are a startup, you are not competing with Google. You are competing with all the SEO firms, all the hundreds of thousands of entrepreneurs who are buying Google Adwords and Google’s ability to sell this vast network of available pages on which to advertise,” he explained.
“Cuil has to be ready to fight a long and hard battle, much the way Toyota has over the past 50 years with General Motors,” Austin noted.
“How many people took on General Motors and won? It has taken Toyota 50 years, and they are still not No. 1. Anyone taking on Google or Microsoft or any market leader must be prepared for a long fight. And it is not going to be by directly attacking the strength of the machine, either,” he said.
For Cuil to be successful, it needs to be able to draw to its site consumers who in the course of an average day have multiple touches with any given Google product. Google’s installed search toolbars, Gmail, Google Docs and other applications all keep users coming back to Google.
“Google, when briefed on the announcement, said that its index had reached 1 trillion URLs, though not all of them lead to unique Web pages.”
Though Cuil may aspire to challenge Google, it has some basic service and accuracy issues to deal with first. After that, it can join Exalead, Hakia, Mahalo, Powerset, and Wikia in their quests to challenge the big-league search engines.