Ex-Googlers' search engine draws fanfare, but testers prefer Google

Computerworld - While there has never been a shortage of would-be "Google-killers" — upstarts aiming to beat the search giant at its own game — few have generated fanfare like Cuil Inc. The start-up company's founders say that their search engine, also called Cuil (pronounced cool), offers an index that's three times larger than that of any other search engine.

Perhaps in anticipation of today's launch, Google Inc. on Friday boasted that it has tracked more than 1 trillion URLs on the Web. And the market leader's position was bolstered a bit today because the Cuil site was unavailable for some periods of time throughout the day.

Nonetheless, Cuil's reputation benefits from the backgrounds of those who launched the start-up firm. Anna Patterson, Cuil's president and chief operating officer, worked as an architect of Google's search index and led that company's Web page ranking team. Her co-founder and husband, Tom Costello, who is Cuil's CEO, researched and developed search engine technology at Stanford and IBM.

But despite Cuil's claim that it had indexed 120 billion Web pages and that it provides relevant results based on Web page content analysis, which goes beyond Google's link analysis techniques, some early reviewers questioned whether it can compete with Google.

Danny Sullivan, a blogger at Search Engine Land, acknowledged the pedigrees of the founders of the company. "These people know search," he wrote. "In particular, they know on-the-firing line, heavy-duty, industrial-strength search. Not only that, they're unleashing what appears to be a comprehensive service that anyone can use."

However, he debunked the company's claim that it uses content rather than popularity to link Web pages. Sullivan noted that he tested the search engine with a search for the term "Harry Potter." The Harry Potter & the Order of the Phoenix movie Web site came up first on Cuil, he noted.

"This is out of thousands of possible pages," he added. "How on earth can Cuil know just from the content on the page itself that the movie site should be in the top results, especially in a Web environment where people can (and will) custom-tailor content to mislead search algorithms? The answer is link analysis — counting links and effectively seeing who is pointed at the most. The twist is that it is done by measuring the links from pages relevant to what someone searches on."

He went on to note that today's largest search engine companies, Google, Microsoft Corp. and Yahoo Inc., offer more than just the Web searching that Cuil is providing.

"News search, image search, video search, local search — these are just some of the verticals that Cuil lacks but which do get used by searchers," Sullivan pointed out. "Not offering these makes Cuil feel too focused on what 'old school' search used to be and [like it is] missing out on the Search 3.0 vertical and blended search revolution that has been going on."