Filed under: Uncategorized, Yuya posts | Tags: alternative energy investing, cool new search engine, fast new search engine, google rival cuil.com, kewl search engine, windpower stocks
The first thing that strikes you upon viewing kewl search results for the first time is the look and feel. By combining bold headlines with ample text and selective imagery, http://www.cuil.com is able to evoke the elegance and readability of a print magazine.
Here is a recent article from the toronto newspaper The Globe and Mail:
Google Rival to speed up searches
BY JESSICA E. VASCELLARO
A startup founded by engineers from Google Inc. and other technology giants is launching a search engine that claims to cover three times as many Web pages as Google.
Cuil Inc. is to launch its product today, aiming to deliver better results than other major search engines by searching across more Web pages and studying them more accurately. Cuil’s results page resembles an online magazine, a different look and feel than search juggernaut Google’s.
“You can’t be an alternative search engine and smaller,” said Anna Patterson, Cuil cofounder and president, and one of the engineers who helped build the search index of Mountain View Calif.-based Google. “You have to be an alternative and bigger.”
Cuil, located in Menlo Park, Calif., is the most recent in a long string of search-engine startups to try to take on Google in an industry that has been difficult to crack for even giants like Microsoft Corp. of Redmond, Wash.
Many have tried to compete by focusing on particular areas, such as searching images or allowing users to review and edit results. Many of these Google challengers have crumbled after failing to build enough scale to support their growth through advertising; a few others have been acquired by larger players.
Cuil has raised $33-million (U.S.) from venture-capital investors, and has a deep bench of career search engineers, including Ms. Patterson and her co-founder and husband, Tom Costello. Mr. Costello built search technology for International Business Machines Corp. of Armonk, N.Y., and was on the research faculty at Stanford University.
Greg Sterling, an Internet analyst with Sterling Market Intelligence, said that team, along with the fact that Cuil already has built such a large search engine from scratch, bodes well for its ability to compete in the long term. But like all new search entrants, it must still find a way to generate enough ad revenue to pay for the hefty infrastructure and technology costs of scaling a search engine, he warned. “It won’t be clear at least for a year or so whether they can break into the top group.”
Ms. Patterson said other search startups have failed because they haven’t found a way to search more Web pages than Google.
Cuil, which claims to be able to search for results across 120 billion Web pages, compared with across Google’s estimated 40 billion, says it has solved that problem. Ms. Patterson said it has developed a faster and better way to index Web pages that relies on fewer machines.
In addition to looking at the popularity of a Web page, Cuil analyzes concepts on the page and their relationships, grouping similar results under different menus. A Cuil search for “Bruce Springsteen,” for example, pulls up a section for results on the artist and a section for results pertaining to tickets. A search on Google for “Bruce Springsteen” pulls up similar results, including the same homepage and some fan pages, but displays them in one long list of links.
Like Google, Cuil eventually plans to make money through advertising, although the service won’t display any ads at launch.
More suggested browsing (one of these links could change your life):
Wind energy company websites, windpower investing
Geothermal energy stocks, geothermal power investments
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Yuyajoe's Weblog 
Cuil is definitely going for it, but it’s hard to imagine them doing anything but incremental changes to what Google’s done. And even that would take years of effort.
Me.dium.com has taken a different tack. We have a full web index, but we change the results based on the surfing activity of our user base (now over 2,000,000). It’s in alpha, but I’d be curious to hear your thoughts. http://me.dium.com/search
Comment by Chris August 4, 2008 @ 6:48 pm