Former Google engineers launch new search engine

Can you believe that someone is trying to break the Google’s dominance on the search engine market and has announced that two days ago? No, you are wrong – no one of the so called "big names" are involved. But you should probably remember this two: www.cuil.com and Anna Patterson.

Cuil is claims the index of 120 billion Web pages, and Anna Patterson, founder of Cuil Inc. is claiming to have 3 time bigger index then the Google itself, which unfortunately can not be checked  - after 2004, Google do not give away information about the size of their search engine index.    

So I have try it – and interestingly, it work very well for me. Before Google, I was using Yahoo & AltaVista for my internet searching (yeah, I’m preeety old in this biz). But after I've tried Google ten years ago, I felt the quantum leap of efficiency and never looked before. Fanny thing, on this Monday, I had the same  feeling when I started to use www.cuil.com.

What is interesting about this search engine is the story behind. It tells the very basic thing, that 99% of CEO’s around the world preach, perhaps 10% of them believe and less then 1% put to practice: the people involved in your projects are the only real capital that you have in your company, everything else is easily expandable.

Measured through its ambitions, Cuil is relatively small startup of Anna Peterson, who has a solid academic carieer behind. She got attention of Google after creating relatively big search engine index over entries in  www.archive.org,  and from 2004 to 2006 she was a Google employee on key positions in some of the core projects of Google.

Thereafter, she left Google and took some very interesting people with her: her husband, Tom Costello (specialist in non-monotonic reasoning and heuristics), Louis Monier (also former AltaVista and Ebay search engine architect)  and  Russell Power, a technical lead for the serving part of TeraGoogle. They together founded the Cuil Inc. and got some venture capital to start with.

Last three years Cuil Inc. spent away from media coverage (a bit surprising if you think about the capacity of involved people) – until 2 days ago. The search engine started, then crashed under user pressure, thenafter was supported with additional hardware on the rush – and it works today surprisingly good. After trying several search phrases in Google and Cuil, Cuil behaves better for me – not to mention the way the information are presented. You should try it… it is not easy to describe it, but that "news column  lay-outing" of search result is something that makes me think “Why in a world had no one ever before think of that?”.

The market has its own mechanism, and it is going to take a while that people really start to use Cuil. But it is going to come to become a player, that is for sure – this is, after all, the very first attack on Google’s position from some of its former employees… I was of course a bit disappointed that some of the keywords that ranks MontenaSoft in Google searches very high do not work so good in Cuil. Luckily, other Drupal focused companies also did not perform very well ;-). So if you are looking for a project in Drupal that you can start and lead, try with SEO optimization techniques for Cuil – there are good chances that you can create yourself a sponsored job.