In her two years at Google, Anna Patterson helped design and build some of the pillars of the company’s search engine, including its large index of Web pages and some of the formulas it uses for ranking search results.
Now, along with her husband, Tom Costello, and a few other Google alumni, she is trying to upstage her former employer.
Yesterday, their company, Cuil, was unveiling a search engine that they promise would be more comprehensive than Google’s and that they hope will give its users more relevant results.
“I think it will be better,” Costello said in an interview. “But there is no question that the public has to decide.”
Cuil, pronounced “cool,” is only the latest in a long string of startup companies that have been founded and financed with the goal of competing with Google, as well as Yahoo and Microsoft.
Last month, Google accounted for 61.5 percent of search queries in the US, while Yahoo held 20.9 percent and Microsoft had 9.2 percent, comScore data showed.
Some of the most prominent include Powerset, which Microsoft recently bought, and Wikia, which was founded by Jimmy Wales, one of the creators of Wikipedia. So far, none has managed to make a dent in the search market.
But some analysts say Cuil has potential, in part because of the pedigree of its founders.
“This is the most promising thing I’ve seen in a while,” said Danny Sullivan, who has followed the online search business for more than a decade and is the editor of Search Engine Land.
“Whether they are going to threaten Microsoft, much less Google, that’s another story,” he said.
Costello, a former researcher at Stanford, said that with 120 billion Web pages, Cuil’s search index is larger than any other.
The company uses a form of data mining to group Web pages by content, which makes the search engine more efficient, he said.
Instead of showing results as short snippets of text and images with links, it displays longer entries and uses more pictures. It also provides tools to help users further refine their queries.
Google would not comment on Cuil and would not disclose the size of its own index. But in an e-mail statement, Google said it maintained “the largest collection of documents searchable on the Web” and welcomed competition.
Sullivan said he was unimpressed by Cuil’s claim that its index includes more Web pages, adding that this could mean users are “overwhelmed by a whole bunch of junk.”
But he said Cuil’s new approach to ranking pages and presenting results could prove to be a hit with some users.
“If it turns out that they have good relevancy, I could see that the word of mouth” would bring Cuil some popularity, he said.
Patterson left Google in 2006 to found Cuil. The new company has other prominent former Google employees, including Russell Power, who worked with Patterson on the large Google index, and Louis Monier, a former chief technology officer at AltaVista, a pioneering search engine. Cuil, which has about 30 employees and is in Menlo Park, California, has raised US$33 million from venture investors.
CALL FOR SUPPORT: President William Lai called on lawmakers across party lines to ensure the livelihood of Taiwanese and that national security is protected President William Lai (賴清德) yesterday called for bipartisan support for Taiwan’s investment in self-defense capabilities at the christening and launch of two coast guard vessels at CSBC Corp, Taiwan’s (台灣國際造船) shipyard in Kaohsiung. The Taipei (台北) is the fourth and final ship of the Chiayi-class offshore patrol vessels, and the Siraya (西拉雅) is the Coast Guard Administration’s (CGA) first-ever ocean patrol vessel, the government said. The Taipei is the fourth and final ship of the Chiayi-class offshore patrol vessels with a displacement of about 4,000 tonnes, Lai said. This ship class was ordered as a result of former president Tsai Ing-wen’s (蔡英文) 2018
‘SECRETS’: While saying China would not attack during his presidency, Donald Trump declined to say how Washington would respond if Beijing were to take military action US President Donald Trump said that China would not take military action against Taiwan while he is president, as the Chinese leaders “know the consequences.” Trump made the statement during an interview on CBS’ 60 Minutes program that aired on Sunday, a few days after his meeting with Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) in South Korea. “He [Xi] has openly said, and his people have openly said at meetings, ‘we would never do anything while President Trump is president,’ because they know the consequences,” Trump said in the interview. However, he repeatedly declined to say exactly how Washington would respond in
WARFARE: All sectors of society should recognize, unite, and collectively resist and condemn Beijing’s cross-border suppression, MAC Minister Chiu Chui-cheng said The number of Taiwanese detained because of legal affairs by Chinese authorities has tripled this year, as Beijing intensified its intimidation and division of Taiwanese by combining lawfare and cognitive warfare, the Mainland Affairs Council (MAC) said yesterday. MAC Minister Chiu Chui-cheng (邱垂正) made the statement in response to questions by Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) Legislator Puma Shen (沈柏洋) about the government’s response to counter Chinese public opinion warfare, lawfare and psychological warfare. Shen said he is also being investigated by China for promoting “Taiwanese independence.” He was referring to a report published on Tuesday last week by China’s state-run Xinhua news agency,
‘NOT SUBORDINATE’: Only Taiwanese can decide the nation’s future, and people preserving their democratic way of life is not a provocation, President William Lai said Taiwan does not want China’s “one country, two systems,” and must uphold its freedom and democracy as well as resolve to defend itself, President William Lai (賴清德) said yesterday, rejecting Beijing’s latest bid to bring the country under Chinese control. The president made the remarks while attending a commissioning ceremony for Taiwan’s first battalion of M1A2T Abrams tanks in Hsinchu County’s Hukou Township (湖口). The tanks are made by General Dynamics, a major US defense contractor. China this week said it “absolutely will not” rule out using force over Taiwan, striking a much tougher tone than a series of articles in state media
RSS