What happened to Cuil, the Google killer?

Posted on July 6, 2009
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I am not sure how many of you remember the launch of Cuil (pronounced Cool), a new search engine that was going to be a “Google killer” last year. The company was started by Anna Patterson, an ex-Googler. In fact, she had previously started another successful search engine called “Recall” which was really an Internet archive. She later sold it to Google and joined the Google team.

Cuil had an index of 125 billion web pages at launch. Most search engine companies need a large hardware farm to support the search query. The search engines “scatter” the query to many machines and then aggregate the results which take time. Tom Costello, Anna’s husband and the CEO of Cuil came up with an algorithm to serve search results using just 145 machines. The uniqueness of the algorithm was to serve the results from fewer machines thereby producing faster results. This provides the search engine the advantage of actually doing more computation on the data set to provide highly relevant data. The search engine also claims that it shows the diversity of search, meaning that they show you different meanings of search terms. For example, searching “Tesla” on Google, you get results mostly about the electric car. If you do the same search on “Cuil”, you supposedly get the different meanings of Tesla which includes the electric car, but maybe also the Tesla museum, Nikola Tesla, etc.

The company had raised $33M in funding from several VC’s to launch cuil. I remember the media coverage the company received on the day of the launch. This huge media coverage actually worked to their disadvantage because when people searched the term “cuil”, the search engine produced zero results. This caused a huge embarrassment to the company. Also, many in the media thought the name “cuil” was not intuitive and was difficult to remember.

I recently visited the site Cuil.com and I see that it is still around. But their alexa rank is around 15,000 which is very low for a successful search engine. So much for being a “Google killer” I guess.

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