Google gears up for a “Cuil“ challenge

30 July 2008

Cyberspace has been buzzing with the news of a new search engine, and this ''cool'' new entrant in the Web search stakes proposes to take on the biggest of them all – the ubiquitous Google.

Cuil, pronounced  ''cool'', was launched with much fanfare last Monday, and declared itself as covering three times as much ground as its larger rival by indexing 122 billion pages on the World Wide Web. However, such claims need to be carefully examined before being accepted, considering two of Google's engineers had recently announced that the Google index count had hit one trillion, though not all linked to unique URLs. (See: Google Web index hits one trillion mark)

The driving force behind Cuil is its president Anna Patterson, who is noted for having created the world's biggest search engine index consisting of 30 billion pages using information from the internet archive at Archive.org.

After this phenomenal achievement, Google employed her and the index she created became the starting point for the company's TeraGoogle index.

She is joined by her husband Tom Costello, an Irish academic and businessman. Costello, who had built a prototype of Web Fountain, IBM's Web search analytics tool, is CEO of Cuil. It is his Irish ancestry that sparked the name Cuil, which is taken from a Celtic folklore character called Finn McCuill. The company says its name is Irish (Gaelic) for knowledge and hazel.

The two are joined by two former Google colleagues, Russell Power and Louis Monier. Previously, Monier led the redesign of ecommerce leader eBay's search engine and was the founding chief technology officer of two 1990s Web milestones, AltaVista and BabelFish, the first language translation site.