New search engine takes aim at Google – Cuil
There’s a big new search engine launching Monday: Cuil. Developed and run by the husband-and-wife team of Stanford professor Tom Costello and former Google search architect Anna Patterson, it’s pitched as bigger, faster, and better than Google’s flagship search engine in pretty much every way. The search engine was working at 8am, but in the past few minutes it seems they ran into server issues and put up a message saying they are getting slammed with traffic.
The most important difference between Cuil and Google is its ranking system. Rather than assigning priority to pages based on inbound links as Google does (“Pagerank”), Cuil analyzes the content of Web pages to divine their relevance to a search query. Costello bristled when I asked if this was a semantic search engine like PowerSet (recently sold to Microsoft). Costello said Cuil’s search is “contextual,” and that, “we’re trying to understand the real world, not the Web.”
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