Search Marketing Blog
Competition to be Cool Just Got Hotter
Posted by Sean McMahon on 07.28.2008Last week, we posted notice on our blog that our company just got a little cooler. That is, EngineWorks received a little cooler from Google as recognition of our good standing relationship with the world’s most popular search engine. We even stated that it’s hip to be cool. An announcement yesterday however, by a brash new search engine, may not be so hip in Google’s eyes.
Menlo Park, California-based search engine Cuil (pronounced ‘cool’), created and launched last night by a team of former Google engineers, claims to index more than three times (3X) the number of Web pages as indexed by Google, and more than ten times (10X) the number included in Microsoft Live.
These bold statements, including the claim on the About page at Cuil’s site that it is the ‘world’s biggest search engine’, are also touted in conjunction with promise that, unlike the G-men from Mountain View, Cuil, Inc. will not retain individuals’ search query history, patterns, or behaviors.
In addition, Cuil is attempting to differentiate itself from Google by claiming to have a superior search algorithm that serves-up more relevant results, as evidenced by the following statement found on the Cuil Web site:
Rather than rely on superficial popularity metrics, Cuil searches for and ranks pages based on their content and relevance. When we find a page with your keywords, we stay on that page and analyze the rest of its content, its concepts, their inter-relationships and the page’s coherency.
The Cuil search engine has been developed by Tom Costello and his wife Anna Patterson, who worked along-side fellow former Google engineer Russell Power for several years after Google purchased a search index she created call ‘Recall’. Costello, Patterson, Power, and the former chief technology officer at Alta Vista, Louis Monier, have launched Cuil, Inc. with approximately $33 million in funding led by Madrone Capital Partners.
One final hip aspect of this new venture is fact that ‘cuil’ is an old Irish word meaning ‘knowledge’!
I wonder if it was simply coincidence that the tag-line under the Google logo on the door of mini refrigerator that we received from Google last week is “Cooler Thinking”?
