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Wednesday, July 30, 2008

Ex Googlers release new search engine

Anna Patterson and three other ex- Google employees have released a new search engine, called Cuil (pronounced "cool") which they claim has superior technology, and produces more relevant results.

One of Cuil's features that its owners claim seperates it from Google is the size of its index - 120 Billion pages. This, Patterson claims, is three times the size of Google's index. Google came back this week on the Google blog stating that Googlebot regularly crawls 1 trillion URL's, but doesn't index them all to improve the quality of their index.

Another attempted USP of Cuil is the fact that they don't store browser's history, unlike Google. Cuil says on its privacy page: "We have no idea who sends queries: not by name, not by IP address, and not by cookies (more on this later). Your search history is your business, not ours." This move was taken to rail against the creeping privacy and data protection issues raised by Google's ever expanding web prescence.

The layout oy Cuil's search results is different too. Rather than having the standard 10 text links in the SERPS, Cuils results have images and larger descriptions, plus drop down menus to explore further.

Probably Cuil's most interesting feature is the way it deviates away from the PageRank-dominted world of Google towards an engine of latent semantic indexing (LSI) and intelligent text scanning. Instead of using the number and quality of incoming links to a site as the primary metric used to calculate its rankings (like Google), Cuil uses LSI to more intelligently scan the text in a document to determine its relevancy. LSI looks at the other words in the page besides the keyphrase and uses complex language algorithms to work out how related words in the document are, and what the page is really about.

Despite these quite interesting features, and the publicity given to the ex-Googlers by the media, I don't rate Cuil's chances of making serious inroads into Google's market share very highly. Google is simply so dominant, and so many so-called "Google killer" search engines have come and gone, that Cuil will in all likelyhood fall by the wayside after the intial buzz subsides.

We will see how things turn out for Cuil over the coming months.