Cuil: Google engineers launch competitor (WSJ)

By Nancy Tartaglione-Vialatte

A startup founded by engineers from Google Inc. and other tech giants is launching a search engine that claims to cover three times as many Web pages as Google. The Wall Street Journal reports that Cuil Inc. plans to launch its product today and aims to deliver better results than other major search engines by searching across more Web pages and studying them more accurately.

The site's results page resembles an online magazine in a different look and feel from Google.

"You can't be an alternative search engine and smaller," Anna Patterson, Cuil co-founder and president, and one of the engineers who helped build Google's search index, told the Journal. "You have to be an alternative and bigger."

Cuil, based in Menlo Park, Calif., is the most recent in a long string of search-engine startups to try to take on Google.

Many have tried to compete by focusing on particular areas but many have also crumbled after failing to build enough scale to support their growth through advertising.

Cuil has raised $33 million from venture-capital investors and has a deep bench of career search engineers, including Patterson and her co-founder and husband, Tom Costello. It was Costello who built search technology for IBM. He was also on the research faculty at Stanford University.

Greg Sterling, an Internet analyst with Sterling Market Intelligence, said that team, along with the fact that the company has already built such a large search engine from scratch, bodes well for its ability to compete in the long term. But like all comers, the company must still find a way to generate enough advertising revenue to fund the infrastructure and technology costs of scaling a search engine. "It won't be clear at least for a year or so whether they can break into the top group," he said.

Cuil claims to be able to search for results across 120 billion Web pages compared with across Google's estimated 40 billion.

In addition to looking at the popularity of a Web page, Cuil also analyzes the concepts on the page and their relationships, the Journal notes. A Cuil search for "Bruce Springsteen," for example, pulls up a section for results on the artist and a section for results pertaining to tickets.

A search on Google for "Bruce Springsteen" pulls up similar results, but displays them in one long list of links. Google doesn't comment on how many Web pages it searches, but a company spokeswoman told the Journal it welcomes "competition that stimulates innovation and provides users with more choice."

Cuil eventually plans to make money through advertising, although the service won't display any ads at launch.