Professional SEO | Internet Marketing

Cuil, the start-up founded by Tom Costello and two former Google employees: Anna Patterson and Russell Power, unveiled a search engine that claims to have more than 120 billion pages in the index. According to Cuil, that's "three times as many as Google and ten times as many as Microsoft."

Cuil, pronounced ...cool..., is an old Irish word for knowledge and is the brainstorm of husband and wife team, Tom Costello and Anna Patterson. The duo have an impressive combination of experience in Internet search. CEO Costello has a extensive background in developing and researching search engines at Stanford University and IBM search. Patterson is a former Google employee and acting President and COO. The Cuil co-founders added the expertise of Russell Power, a former colleague of Patterson?s from Google.

It needs to be mentioned that Anna Patterson was a former employee of Google and that the last search engine created by Anna impressed Google so much that the industry leader decide to buy the technology in the year 2004. The Cuil founders have stated that around 120 billion web pages have been used to build up the index of Cuil and they are of the opinion that the figure is far bigger than Google or Microsoft.

A quick hands-on with Cuil showed that the best thing about the new search engine so far is its interface and design. Searching isn't quiet as effective yet as Google on most subjects, but it's still decent if you're searching for the most popular items on that particular topic.

"Cuil's goal is to solve the two great problems of search: how to index the whole Internet - not just part of it - and how to analyze and sort out its pages so you get relevant results." Cuil thinks that today's search engines can't index all the information that is available on the web (more than one trillion pages, according to Google). Even Google admits that it's selective: "many [web pages] are similar to each other, or represent auto-generated content that isn't very useful to searchers".

Cuil isn't the first Google rival to launch this year. Wikia Search, a highly anticipated search engine from Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales, made its official debut in January . Wikia Search hopes to provide better search results by allowing a community of users to index pages by using their Web page rankings and other suggestions, as well as its own indexing of the Web

resources: gistweb