Cuil, pronounced cool

[Amerigo Vespucci]

Monday, July 28, 2008 - 6:12 AM PDT | Modified: Monday, July 28, 2008 - 6:16 AM
Former Google engineers launch new search engine
Silicon Valley / San Jose Business Journal

http://www.bizjournals.com/sanjose/stories/2008/07/28/daily1.html

A new search engine created by former engineers from Google Inc. launched Sunday night, claiming to cover three times as many Web pages as Google.

Menlo Park-based Cuil Inc. was created by Anna Patterson, her husband, Tom Costello, Russell Power and Louis Monier and is backed by about $33 million in venture funding.

Cuil, pronounced cool, promises not to retain information about its users' search histories or surfing patterns, unlike Mountain View-based Google (NASDAQ:GOOG).

Patterson worked with Power at Google in 2004 after it bought a previous search index she developed called Recall.

Monier is the former chief technology officer of AltaVista, the search engine Google supplanted in the late 1990s. He also eBay Inc.'s (NASDAQ:EBAY) search engine for its online auction site.

[blueraven95]

1. well, I just tried it out...

...took a search that I just did in Google, word-for-word, and put it through Cuil. Granted, it was a slightly complicated search, but Google came up with 2,190,000 hits, Cuil came up with zero. As far as I'm concerned, I'll stick with Google for the time being.

[FloridaJudy]

2. The name is unfortunate

It resembles the vulgar word for "anus" in a number of Latin-based languages. I think I'll pass.

[Greyskye]

3. Buggy

It likes to append on a trailing double quote for no good reason. Didn't do as well as Google in my test searches. Also quite slow.