Menlo Park based Cuil will launch later this evening, introducing their comprehensive search engine that indexes 120 billion web pages — arguably more than any search engine out there (Google, for instance, hosts a trillion unique web pages but does not disclose the size of their index). With background and experience known to include Google employee ex-pats, the husband-and-wife CEO and VP of Engineering team, Tom Costello and Anna Patterson, have been the subject of intense speculation combined with their project of super-stealth search. Along with Russell Power, the trio founded Cuil (pronounced “cool”) and dropped “l” from their search engine’s name.
The success of their search engine mainly comes from its cost-effective backend infrastructure scaled with “secret sauce” of savvy programming. Reportedly, Cuil boasts an index up to Google-scale without the almost billion-dollar-a-year cost Google has to maintain. Micely, the search engine provides results without solely focusing on keywords but rather how words are related together to come up with more relevant options — a departure from the semantic approach of Powerset and unlike the artificial language approach. Results come in three columns with an image and detailed summary more than existing search engines.
Cuil has also put privacy at the top of their agenda: user IP addresses are not recorded and cookies are not used to trace queries — simply put, the data is disposed as it is received. This provides an added security feature and means data is unable to be shared in any capacity, whether it be ignorance or related to any court cases. With two rounds of financing, Greylock, Madrone Capital Partners, and Tugboat Ventures have raised close to $33 million.
Cuil is a revolutionary search engine providing superior results to users that prioritize privacy, cost-effectiveness, and natural connectivity of words to come up with the best results. With the sophistication of the team behind it and the promise of a superior search experience, Cuil is a name to watch.
