Dan's Papers - August 15, 2008

The search engine turned active verb may have competition. Cuil, pronounced "cool," is not only an old Irish word for knowledge but the latest search engine that promises to reach more pages on the Web than ever before. According to their "About Us" section, the site gets to "three times as many as Google and 10 times as many as Microsoft." How cool is Cuil, and how does it stand next to the search-engine giant, Google?

Some key differences between the two are not just in the content they dredge up from back alleys of the Internet but in the way the information is presented. Cuil presents search results across three columns (now with the option of two), with a few small images drawn from the sites. It also searches semantically by related concepts, inter-relationships and a website's coherency. On the other hand, Google presents items in a list form and crawls the Web on many, many different computers for key content tags and attributes. The major point of contention is the fact that Cuil claims to search over 120 billion pages on just 140 servers. They believe that this method will decrease the cost of running servers - less is more.

Just like a car, the only way to rate performance is to take it for a test drive. Here are some common Hamptons searches on Cuil.

Out of the 11 listings on the first page, nine concern Montauk fishing. "Come to Montauk for the 18-pound, monster bluefish." Not exactly the update I was looking for. The search also includes the Wikipedia page for the Montauk Project (the series of government projects conducted for the purpose of developing psychological warfare). This listing didn't even have the word "monster" in the article at all.

No results. Leave your trunks at home.

Zagat. Zagat. Zagat. Not one local publication or website pops up on the first page. No reviews. Just links that bring you to the Zagat: Hamptons Restaurants guide book (2006-08), and then a few links to STREETWISE Maps...for Southampton and East Hampton. If you relied on this search for dinner, you'd still have no idea where to eat tonight.

Come on. How can you mess this one up? I was brought to clubplanet.com, New York Magazine and some tourism website based out of Hawaii. Nothing about the Pink Elephant, the Steven Talkhouse, or even the most talked about nightspot this summer, Surf Lodge in Montauk. See Dan's Nightlife Calendar on page 117 for the real scoop.

Cuil was officially launched on Monday, July 28 by two Google alumni, Anna Patterson and her husband, Tom Costello. Patterson and Costello founded a search engine in the late '90s called Xift. Patterson then wrote a search engine used by the Internet Archives, which was sold to Google, where she then began to operate one of their engineering groups focused on ranking (the part of the search engine that picks which 10 links should appear when you search). The idea for Cuil came about when Patterson returned from maternity leave and decided that Google had become too large.

The new company has other former Google employees, including Louis Monier, a former chief technology officer at AltaVista (a pioneer in the search engine field), and Russell Power, who worked with Patterson on the large Google index. Cuil, which has roughly 30 employees and is based in Menlo Park, California, has raised $33 million from venture capital investors. To date, they've only spent $7 million, which, in the realm of search engines, is a drop of water in an ocean of expenses.

On launch day, Cuil attempted to handle 50 million queries, which was far more than they expected. Patterson was quoted saying that the pattern of searches wasn't what they expected. "People were looking for their names a lot," she said.

When you search yourself, the engine tries to guess what you are about to search. So I got the very predictable Victoria's Secret. No, not today, I thought. When I typed in my full name, the results I garnered were nothing of interest, not even a historical site about Queen Victoria.

The Cuil team still has a lot of work to do and until they shape up and give the people what they want, I'll be Googling all my friends and coworkers.