Google ex-employees launch search engine rival Cuil

A new search engine has been launched by some of Google’s former engineers, to rival their ex-employer’s market leading product. The engineers claim that Cuil can index, faster and more cheaply, a far larger portion of the web than Google can.

The new search engine says its service goes beyond prevailing search techniques that focus on web links and traffic patterns, instead analysing the context of each page and the concepts behind each user search request.

“Our significant breakthroughs in search technology have enabled us to index much more of the internet,
placing nearly the entire web at the fingertips of every user,” said Tom Costello, Cuil co-founder and chief executive.

According to Danny Sullivan, web search analyst and editor-in-chief of Search Engine Land, Cuil could exploit complaints that consumers may have with Google, such as the fact it tries to do too much, its results favour already popular sites, and that it leans heavily on certain authoritative sites, such as Wikipedia.

“The time may be right for a challenger,” Sullivan said. “Competing with Google is still a very daunting task, as Microsoft will tell you,” he added.

According to Anna Patterson, founder of Cuil and former architect of Google’s TeraGoogle index of web pages, Cuil has indexed a 120 billion web pages, three times more than what they say Google currently indexes. She also claims that the company has spent just £2.5 million developing the search engine.