Jump to content
Logo

Google search competitor Cuil launched today

Servers already struggling
Monday, 28 July 2008, 10:15

A NEW UPSTART intending to compete head-on with the Google behemoth, has launched today.

The firm named 'Cuil' but pronounced 'cool' apparently, is formed of previous Google engineers, and intends to out-do Google at what it does best.

The new company is offering a new search engine at www.cuil.com that it claims can index faster and cheaper, a larger portion of the world-wide wibble than current leader, Google.

"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," blithered Tom Costello, co-founder and chief executive, in a press statement.

Cuil groups related web pages of each set of results from a web search performed on the search engine. It then sorts these groups by categories and offers various features to help identify topics and allows users to refine searches.

Cuil has already indexed 120 billion pages - three times more than what it c;aims says Google indexes - adding that the company has only spent $5 million of $33 million venture capital raised.

It seems Google already feels threatened - enough that the company released news on Friday of the indexing of its one trillionth URL.

Though Cuil has been tight with the purse-strings, it may wish to invest in more underlying hardware.

Visiting the site this morning, the search engine was already down, with a message that the servers were under too much load and the company was adding more capacity (below).

Cuil

It should be noted that the engine did come back up during the writing of this article, but we suspect further down-time will ensue. µ

Share this:

Comments
err...

search "convert html to xml" Google: 37,600,000 results. Cuil: 0 results. Err... ? Perhaps those billions they've indexed don't include on of the 37 million ?

posted by : lansalot, 28 July 2008Complain about this comment
Cuil ???

Not very Cuil to me !!! Didn't even know what a 'Poodle Faker' is... Google did...

posted by : Keith Johnson`, 28 July 2008Complain about this comment
So what ?

I have tried this search engine. It's definitely have a good interface. But, has less results. on some searches it returned 0 results where google was able to find 1400. I othere cases it was able to return 3,000,000 where google had 20,000,000. i did almost the same few years ago to test google, msn, yahoo and few others. Still using google.

posted by : Dmitriy, 28 July 2008Complain about this comment
cuil

Cuil's search results look like the layout you expect for spam ads. That, and it's results are pretty irrelevant. Search for 'cuil' and you get nothing on the recent news or the search engine itself. It may search a lot of pages, but it's search needs tweaking. Especially for single words. I like the black background on the main page, though.

posted by : John Smith, 28 July 2008Complain about this comment
??

What a stupid name for a website. I initially thought it was another fine waste of (Irish) taxpayer's money on an Irish-language marekting scam.

posted by : Some Bloke, 28 July 2008Complain about this comment
Lame?

It doesn't know what "AT&T" is. (Lucky bastards.) It seems to have a very broken idea of relevance. E.g. "Paris Orsay University" (see the VP Products's bio, if it's back up now ;-) produces a pile of deep content, but not a link to the university's home page, or any clue that "University of Paris XI" might be another good search term. Good luck to them, but I'm underwhelmed so far.

posted by : Jeff, 28 July 2008Complain about this comment
slow

I tried it.. IT"S SLOW, CUMBERSOME, CLUMSY.. very counter-intuitive. it showed me stuff from 2004 when I wanted to get the latest and greatest.. You know what it feels like? Microsofts LIVE Search.. exactly that which you DON'T want to use.

posted by : neliz, 28 July 2008Complain about this comment
Not too Cuil

It's DOA.

posted by : Poodle Phuker, 28 July 2008Complain about this comment
See you ill?

CUIL? Cool? More likely it's "See you ill." Great, another search engine, more choice is good, but really, that name stinks. So their track record is: -Bad Performance -Server Crash -Dumb Name Even the vole picked a half-decent name.

posted by : GZ, 28 July 2008Complain about this comment
Interface?

The interface SUCKS, it remembers me of Live Search. And I searched for my nickname and it returned old forum posts that aren't even online anymore.

posted by : Orlando, 28 July 2008Complain about this comment
no sir, I don't like it

the results page for cuil is way too "busy" what with pictures and results in a grid instead of a column also, their name is pretentious

posted by : Jason, 28 July 2008Complain about this comment
LOL

I searched for INQUIRER and it didn't found anything! :)

posted by : Orlando, 28 July 2008Complain about this comment
Civilisation is heading down the pan!

Poodle Faker: 4,760 results :- Google 8,260 http://www.cuil.com/search?q=poodle+faker It's launched today, not indexed a fraction of the content, has less architecture, and your forgetting about the quality of the results. Yes the front page is shite, it is very slow and they need to add more architecture, but I am sure it will get up to the minimum performance level to offer a usable service over the coming days or weeks. What is wrong with people, I think civilisation has hit it's peak, now people are just going to get more rude, more selfish, less patient, and more aggressive.

posted by : Nekoni, 28 July 2008Complain about this comment
Not so cuil after all

Why haven't search outfits figured out users don't want to be confused when they visit a search engine, which is the first reason why people use google. I mean, i went to this web search webpage impersonator and tried to do a search. "Dbase2 to access" And in one of the first awful result colums I get this: "'Special Police Officer Resumes in Upper Marlboro, ..." Seriously, what the heck is that?

posted by : Jose Gomez, 28 July 2008Complain about this comment
Terrible

this thing is terrible, I'm sure it's overloaded because I have been hearing a lot of news reports talking about it, but I searched for a simple term out of curiousity "guitar hero 3", first it says it found 51,000 pages, but doesn't load the list, then I try again and it says that there are no results, when I try a third time, it says it found 124,000 results, and again the list doesn't load.

posted by : ryan, 28 July 2008Complain about this comment
ASK in search Bar Now on IE7

Ultie now changes name to Ultee', so search engines can contain Flame of quadrascenic porportions. Question: if my search bar states ASK are only ASK given honour of indexing: the Ultie? Ahso, What happened to microsoft search? Is Microsoft just name grabbed by anyone & exploited to extent that even Microsoft Corp has NO use for its own name? Did your search bar on IE7 change in last few days from microsoft to ASK? Mine Did & ultie asks, how many search bars does Ultie need to penetrate entire Cloud? New Recommendation: Add every search Bar You can find to your primary browser. drashek

posted by : ASK-Ulti, 28 July 2008Complain about this comment
can't find itself..

Lol, Cuil can't seem to find it's own page from typing "cuil" or "cuil.com"...Google's #1 result for cuil search is the actual cuil.com site. google ftw. Google also finds itself perfectly fine.

posted by : Dan, 28 July 2008Complain about this comment
I cooled inquirer and it found the right site

I cooled "inquirer" and it got me here, but not to this article. I think it's a good sign that their servers are overloaded at the outset, it beats the hell out of no traffic at all. BTW, let's start a trend where we call cooling "cooling" because I really don't want to be typing "cuiling". Is there any genuine youtube leprechaun footage?

posted by : Gabe Sorzano, 28 July 2008Complain about this comment
tolower?

The search is case sensitive, how nuts is that?

posted by : Alexh, 28 July 2008Complain about this comment
lol@drashek

He's even worse with computers than my dad is.. which is quite a feat. three cheers for Drashek, may he find his intestants inside an ASK.com server..

posted by : neliz, 28 July 2008Complain about this comment
Not quite msdewey.com !

Got his crawler from crawling my site *thousands* of times each day. Yes, I mean THOUSANDS!!! Darn crawler would crawl it over and over and over and over........ and then some... It ignored robots.txt as well then, and I hope it now follows instructions. I didn't mind it crawling, but seeing 300 or more MB bandwidth being chewed up every day from the same crawler got my goat (I don't even have that much material on the site). I finally got a response when I sent enough emails. I might give it a try again and unblock them as this was several months ago when it was still in beta status. I give them credit for having the proper information so I could look them up. Oh, the http://msdewey.com is a humorous Microsoft Live Search engine. Try searching for "hormones"; she'll sing your answer, just be sure no kids are around to hear! The results are limited, but she is a search engine with attitude.

posted by : CapitalW, 29 July 2008Complain about this comment
Awful name, crap search results.

Searched for "how many shoes in the world": Results: www.cuil.com 1 result = www.birddogbowling.com/ebonite-maxim-captain-midnight-p-155.html "For The Bowler Who Puts A High Priority On Bowling In Style......" What? www.google.com: 7.2mil and all the results on the first page are relevant to shoes. Conclusion - looks like these ex-Google geeks are the dud squad and that google is probably better off without them. Then again it's early days but so far they are rubbish.

posted by : interested_party, 29 July 2008Complain about this comment
Too many unrelated results

Reminds me of using dogpile. Quoted two word searches produce many unrelated pages. Quoted three word searches ... forget it ! You'll never find exactly what your looking for.

posted by : Greg, 29 July 2008Complain about this comment
Advertisement
Subscribe to the INQ Newsletter
Sign-up for the INQBot weekly newsletter
Click here to sign up Existing user
Advertisement
INQ Poll

Consumer Electronics Show

CES 2009 shrinks through lack of interest