Rocking Team

Well lots of attempts have been made including claims of making a search engine better than google. There have been startups like Powerset or Mahalo both of which use natural language or human powered search results as the ‘better than google’ factor to their advantage. But even after the hoopla about who will be the next google killer be none seem to have come even close to the search giant.

Now it seems ex-googlers who were a core part of the google search indexing team in 2004 have come together to launch their own search engine known as Cuil.com.

A look at the management of Cuil and there remains no doubt as to why this startup has already raised 33 million dollars from venture capitalists even before their search engine had launched.

The management at Cuil includes couple Tom Costello and Anna Patterson who both have PhD in Computer Science from Stanford University and illinios University respectively and have had their share of search experiences in IBM and Google. The entire management team profile of Cuil.com can be found here.

Cuil.com boasts a simple fact that makes it Bigger than google. Cuil.com claims to crawl the entire internet rather than only a part of it. Cuil claims to crawl and index nearly 3 times more pages that google i.e. it is able to search for results across 120 billion Web pages compared with Google’s estimated 40 billion!

Now the question to ask here is does anyone even go beyong the first 2-3 pages of search result? Just have 120 billion pages doesn’t mean the search experience might be distinctly better to what google provides. But nonetheless to make sure they don’t look like google cuil’s search results are also showcased differently. Check screenshot below:

Cuil.com has a further filter by category once a you search for a broad keyword like travel or money etc. On the whole I ain’t sure that Cuil in its current state can be called a google killer though one might have to add that given the management’s previous experience in search technology one cant completely write them off and would have to watch their further progress.

Originally posted 2008-08-04 01:26:19.