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121,617,892,992 web pages - that’s the number of pages that Cuil, a new search engine claims to index. It’s a lot. More than 120 billion pages, wow!
Cuil searches more pages on the Web than anyone else—three times as many as Google and ten times as many as Microsoft.
Google don’t disclose the information regarding their index size, but according to this statement they store about 40 billion web pages. Cuil seems to be the search engine that holds the most comprehensive index of web pages on the Internet, even thought Google identified 1 trillion unique URL’s on the Internet.
Cuil overview
Cuil was founded by Tom Costello (CEO), Anna Patterson (VP of Engineering) and Russell Power (Co-founder). They managed to raise $33M in funds for the project from Madrone Capital Partners, Greylock Partners and Tugboat Ventures.
Since the developing stage the company dropped out from one “l” in the name, changing from “Cuill” to “Cuil”, pronounced as “cool”.
Cuil- the powerful search engine
2 ex-Google employees, Patterson and Power, made a breakthrough and claim to find a way to collect and store web data faster and much more cost-effective than Google, which is speculated to spend over 1 billion dollars to maintain their search engine infrastructure per year. That’s one of the main reasons their database is so huge (storing one page is cheaper than at Google meaning they can store more pages at the same cost as Google) and the way to convince their sponsors to give their money to the Cuil company.
Cuil claims to have better search engine results relevancy than Google and other search engines. It rank websites in a different way than Google and other search engines. Their approach is more semantic. Cuil tries to categorize web pages based on their meaning, even if the category name does not appear on the web page itself.
Cuil search engine is experimenting with different type of search interface where results are shown in three columns, with picture, more text describing a website and “Explore by website” feature. That last feature suggests other related categories to the search query.
At this point Cuil is not showing any sponsored results or other forms of online ads.
Cuil principles
The Internet is getting bigger and more disorganized every day. 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… Size matters because many people use the Internet to find information that is of interest to them, even if it’s not popular.
Privacy Policy is very important to the startup search engine. They do not store any data, not IP, no personal identifiable informations, nothing. As they use semantic search algorithm they don’t need to know their users habits, click-through and general Internet behavior.
Sphere: Related ContentBecause Cuil analyzes Web pages and not click-throughs, we don’t need to know your search history and habits. So our privacy policy is very simple: when you search with Cuil, we do not collect any personally identifiable information, period…Your search history is your business, not ours.
- Tags: cuil, Google, Search engines
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Pawel Szulencki is a SEO (Search Engine Optimization) and Marketing certified specialist who is interested in organic SEO, paid campaigns (PPC) and Social Media Marketing channels. (Read more)
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Jonathan (2 comments.)
July 29th, 2008 at 8:26 pm
I did a search for one of my clients and a lot of porn links showed up. The keyword was HVAC School. I think somethings a little fishy with the sites they have indexed. Also, it was showing the images from my clients site but the link went to a free parking site not even related to HVAC.
Pawel Szulencki (24 comments.)
July 29th, 2008 at 9:02 pm
Yes, definitely Cuil have to work on relevancy of their results. Im guessing they will continue to work hard on their technology as this is just the beginning for this search engine. Who knows, maybe in couple of years it will join the biggest players on the search market?
But i agree Jonathan that for now its more of a fun to search with Cuil rather than pleasure.
David Hobson (1 comments.)
July 29th, 2008 at 9:47 pm
I dont think Google has anything to worry about here. Not only is there interface rubbish but there search results are completly irrelevant.
David Hobsons last blog post..In My RSS Reader This Week - 9th Edition
Rob (4 comments.)
July 29th, 2008 at 11:13 pm
They have poor results, and their thumbnails don’t match the content well. They have a lot of work to do if they want to be half as good as Google. They have however done a great job on their press release. Too bad their site isn’t ready yet.
Robs last blog post..Business Plan
Pawel Szulencki (24 comments.)
July 30th, 2008 at 10:12 am
David & Rob, you are both right. Google has nothing to fear of at the moment. Cuil is still in development stage and they must work on the relevancy of their results.
And they surely done a great PR job. 120 billion indexed web pages, that’s something to be proud of. But i guess we still have to wait for really interesting results from Cuil.
Jonathan (2 comments.)
July 30th, 2008 at 5:43 pm
I agree with Pawel that it might be helpful in the near future and be up there with the big boys but they have some work ahead of them.
istioselida (8 comments.)
July 31st, 2008 at 12:56 pm
i agree with the comments here, i would like to add also that it only work in English,l so it was impossible for me to check its value for the search in Greek. But the comparison to the search of the same words in Google, for example, show some results that are really poor
Pawel Szulencki (24 comments.)
July 31st, 2008 at 1:39 pm
A non-english search results on Cuil are indeed embarrassing. A search engine holding data of over 120 billion web pages should have some non-english websites indexed as well. Google on the other hand is doing excellent job providing local language results. Cuil needs to learn a lot.
Chris (1 comments.)
August 4th, 2008 at 6:23 pm
Cuil is a bit naff based on what I’ve seen so far. 80% of searches turn up a 404, often when I try and read the terms and conditions it either loads wrong or shows a 404, when it DOES manage a ’succesful’ search, it’s irrelevant cack…
Chriss last blog post..iWish iHadn’t!
Pawel Szulencki (18 comments.)
August 4th, 2008 at 7:55 pm
@Chris Cuil is experiencing the problems you described because of the amount of traffic they have at the moment which is crashing their servers. The buzz around Cuil generates great amount of visitors. Cuil should deal with that problem soon.
I have also noticed the problem with various pages of their website. Sometimes it’s impossible to access “About us” page from one page while from another web page it is loading perfectly etc. I have no explanation for this.
And the relevancy of their search results…no comment. I agree with you on that.