14 DAY TRIAL // Today, a team of engineers who have previously worked at Google, IBM, eBay, Altavista and the Stanford University, announced the launching of the "biggest search engine on the web." The fact that its database adds up to more than 120 billion pages makes it indeed large - three times bigger than any other known search engine, as the team says.
The question is why people would prefer the new tool when established search engines already offer very good returns for their queries. "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." says Tom Costello, CEO and co-founder of Cuil.
As the team underscores, the most important improvement that Cuil brings is that it offers content-based results, supported by the analysis of concepts and context behind the queries. This sets up something that might indeed be seen with great interest by those who don't like their private information being used in any way. Because Cuil doesn't return results based on the popularity of a page, namely the number of clicks that were previously performed on it, the search engine doesn't need any of the users' details.
The display of results is another particularity - the pages are not open to view as a linear list, but as a three-column list, with additional categories to inform users about the fields that match the query. Other tools help users refine their searches, such as tabs with hints for related queries and images.
"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." says Anna Patterson, President and COO of Cuil. The former Google employee also wants it to be known that her previous workplace was not that challenging anymore. She and her husband, the other co-founder of Cuil, "have shared a vision of the ideal search engine" since they were still students at Stanford.