Menlo Park based Cuil (pronounced ‘cool’), has launched a massive search engine today, with an index of 120 billion web pages. This is arguably the most comprehensive search engine on the web. Patterson believes that’s at least three times the size of Google’s index, although there is no way to know for certain as Google doesn’t disclose the size of their index.

This massive search engine project was founded by highly respected search experts, husband-and-wife team of Stanford professor Tom Costello and former Google search architect Anna Patterson, joined by Russell Power who also is an ex-Google empoyee.

Anna Patterson’s last Internet search engine was so impressive that search engine leader Google Inc. bought the technology in 2004 to upgrade its own search engine. She believes her latest invention is even more valuable, however, this time it won’t be for sale.

The most striking difference between Cuil and Google is in its ranking system. Rather than assigning authority and higher rankings to pages based on inbound links as Google does (“Pagerank“), Cuil analyzes the content of Web pages to decide their relevance to a search query.

Cuil claims its search is contextual. What this means, in the real world, is that Cuil results are automatically categorized. So, if you search for ‘Japan’, Cuil will automatically bring up relevant categories such as ‘Prefectures of Japan’, ‘Port Cities in Japan’ etc.

Cuil Features

Cuil’s results are presented in a more magazine-like format instead of just a vertical stack of Web links. Cuil’s results are displayed with more photos spread horizontally across the page and include sidebars for categories to the right of results, that can be clicked on to learn more about topics related to the original search request.

Backed by $33 million in venture capital, the search engine plans to begin processing requests for the first time starting from today. Cuil is just the latest in a long line of Google challengers. Compared with Google’s globe spanning data network of data centers, Cuil’s two modest data centers hosting less than 2,000 PCs total will have to run pretty fast to outpace Google’s crawlers. On the very first day of their launch, their servers seem to be out of power to handle the unexpected surge in traffic on their website. 

I was further disappointed with its search results when I tried to search for ‘indian curry’. I received the response – “We didn’t find any results for indian curry … please check your spelling …”. That’s a big flaw in Cuil’s algorithm. Cuil also failed to fetch any results for other long tail keywords I tried, like ‘tokyo based chinese restaurants’. And. when I tried searching for ’seo consultants in mumbai’, it fetched all the consultants in USA and Germany !! I feel there is long way to go for Cuil to take on Google.

Cuil Search Engine Results

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