Cool Cuil image drawing on it's Irish heritage - click for a cool search    

SV Editors comment: Initial test searches indicate accurate simple searches for Surfing & Surfers

Surfersvillage Global Surf News, 1 August, 2008 : - - Menlo Park, Calif.— Cuil, a technology company pioneering a new approach to search, unveils its innovative search offering, which combines the biggest Web index with content-based relevance methods, results organized by ideas, and complete user privacy. Cuil (www.Cuil.com) has indexed 120 billion Web pages, three times more than any other search engine.

Cuil (pronounced COOL) provides organized and relevant results based on Web page content analysis. The search engine goes beyond today’s search techniques of link analysis and traffic ranking to analyze the context of each page and the concepts behind each query. It then organizes similar search results into groups and sorts them by category.

Cuil gives users a richer display of results and offers organizing features, such as tabs to clarify subjects, images to identify topics and search refining suggestions to help guide users to the results they seek.

“The Web continues to grow at a fantastic rate and other search engines are unable to keep up with it,” said Tom Costello, CEO and co-founder of Cuil. “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. In addition, Cuil presents searchers with content-based results, not just popular ones, providing different and more insightful answers that illustrate the vastness and the variety of the Web.”

Cuil’s technology was developed by a team with extensive history in search. The company is led by husband-and-wife team Tom Costello and Anna Patterson. Mr. Costello researched and developed search engines at Stanford University and IBM; Ms. Patterson is best known for her work at Google, where she was the architect of the company’s large search index and led a Web page ranking team. They refused to accept the limitations of current search technology and dedicated themselves to building a more comprehensive search engine. Together with Russell Power, Anna’s former colleague from Google, they founded Cuil to give users the opportunity to explore the Internet more fully and discover its true potential.

“Since we met at Stanford, Tom and I have shared a vision of the ideal search engine,” said Anna Patterson, President and COO of Cuil. “Our team approaches search differently. By leveraging our expertise in search architecture and relevance methods, we’ve built a more efficient yet richer search engine from the ground up. The Internet has grown and we think it’s time search did too.”

Cuil’s methods guarantee online privacy for searchers. Since the search engine ranks pages based on content instead of number of clicks, personal data collection is unnecessary, so personal search history is always private.

NB: Cuil is an old Irish word for knowledge. For knowledge, ask Cuil.

Summary of Cuil’s features:

Biggest Internet search engine—Cuil has indexed 120 billion Web pages, 3x more than any other search engine
Organized results—Cuil’s magazine-style layout separates results by subject and allows further search by concept or category
Different results—Unlike other search engines, Cuil ranks results by the content on each page, not its popularity
Complete privacy protection—Cuil does not keep any personally identifiable information on users or their search histories

www.Cuil.com

A quick look back at launch…

Whew…

Wow. That was intense. Looking back at the first 48 hours since launch, it was quite an experience. After a lot of hard work, we were thrilled to begin offering our new approach to search. We were even more thrilled with the interest, and traffic, we received.

In fact, it was overwhelming—literally. While we had planned for a large number of searches on our first day, we hadn’t planned on more than 50 million. After all, that’s in the same ballpark as Microsoft’s Live Search and approaching Yahoo!. And they have a bit more infrastructure than our small start-up.

So for a good part of the first day, the traffic volume simply outstripped our ability to respond. Some machines failed. Some bugs were found. Some of our redundancies…weren’t so redundant. This meant some searches didn’t get the best results. Some didn’t get any.

And yet, for a lot of searches, Cuil did provide users with new results, different from the ones folks have gotten in the past, according to the reports we’ve received. This is one of our goals—to give people an alternative to existing approaches.

Thank you very much for the feedback. The emails we’ve gotten at feedback@cuil.com have been very helpful, telling us areas you enjoy—such as the layout and the search by category feature—and areas where we need to improve—image matching, for example. We read them, so please keep them coming.

At Cuil, we are tackling some of the big challenges in search, from finding ways to search more of the Web, to finding results by analyzing the content on a page, to providing images with our results to help you pick the page you want. These are difficult problems, and we know we have more work to do.

We are incredibly proud of what this small team of 30 employees has been able to build from scratch already, and we are committed to improving Cuil every day. Thank you for trying us out.

Tom, Anna and Russell


About Cuil
Cuil (pronounced COOL) is a search engine that combines the largest Web index with content-based relevance methods, organized results, and complete user privacy. The company’s next generation approach to search is the result of proprietary breakthroughs in search architecture and ranking algorithms. Cuil’s employees have extensive experience in search, having worked at Google, IBM, eBay, AltaVista, Stanford University, the Internet Archive and other technology companies and research centers. Cuil is located in Menlo Park, California and has received series A funding from Tugboat Ventures and Greylock Partners, and series B funding from Madrone Capital Partners. Cuil derives its name from an old Irish word for knowledge, reflecting the background of co-founder and CEO, Tom Costello, who hails from Drogheda, Ireland.

For more information, please visit www.cuil.com.

More USA/Cen Amer. surfing news available here
Check the latest West Coast Surf Reports and Forecasts

New! B2B News ASBE-Surf   |  Receive News-Alerts

Contacts
Vince Sollitto, Cuil
press@cuil.com

Andrea MacLean, Manning Selvage & Lee
andrea.maclean@mslpr.com

Coomunications - Surfersvillage