Google has been king of the search engines, and more important King of the Click Ads, for a long time now. Two ex Goole Employees and a another search engine expert from IBM and Stanford, have announced a competitor, Cuil (pronounced "cool").
For the full story, read here.
July 28, 2008 (IDG News Service) A former Google Inc. employee and her husband launched a new search engine on Monday called Cuil (pronounced "cool"), aiming to topple Google by indexing more Web pages than the search giant.
Cuil Inc. in Menlo Park, Calif., is led by Anna Patterson , a former leader of Google’s search index, and her husband, Tom Costello, who researched and developed search engines at Stanford University and IBM . The two, president and CEO, respectively, met at Stanford.
Russell Power, the third co-founder of the group, also worked at Google on search indexing, Web rankings and spam detection. He works as vice president of engineering at Cuil.
Why does the world need another search engine?
[The company] said it has indexed 120 billion Web pages and can provide results organized by ideas with complete privacy for users.
(emphasis added)
Other than the privacy concern how is Cuil different?
Cuil said its search engine goes beyond traditional approaches by analyzing the context of each page and the concepts behind each query so it can provide better rankings by content rather than popularity. Cuil then organizes similar results into groups and sorts them by category. It also offers tabs to clarify subjects, as well as suggestions on how to refine searches.
My first use of the service wasn’t impressive — it couldn’t handle my search because of overloaded Web site — but I’ll keep trying, particularly if I can figure out how to add Cuil to my Firefox Search box.
Give it a try. The URL, of course, is www.cuil.com.
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