“Cuil” supposedly means “wisdom” in Gaelic. In English, pronounced “cool,” it means business when it comes to Internet search. That's what its founders, nearly all ex-Google employees, want you to believe. Let's take a look at their claims and their performance to see whether it's wise to take them seriously.
Cuil is the brainchild of Tom Costello, Anna Patterson, Russell Power and Louis Monier. Costello is an ex-IBM employee and former member of Stanford University's Research faculty, and his work at both organizations focused on search. Anna Patterson joined Google in 2004 after it bought Recall, the search engine she designed, which indexed 12 billion pages (a record at that time). At Google she handled the problem of scaling architecture – keeping up with the growth of the web. She left in 2006 to build Cuil.
Power and Monier, like Patterson, boast Google on their resumes. Both dealt with issues of scale as part of their day-to-day work, like Patterson. Monier also did serious work on search at eBay and AltaVista. When founders have this kind of background, even Google has to sit up and take notice. One has to ask: how does Cuil approach search, and how is it different from Google's approach?
Cuil points to four guiding principles in its philosophy. First, it believes that size matters, which is not surprising when you consider the background of the founders. Second, popularity is useful, but not always important. This is reflected in its claim to index pages based on content and context rather than just the number of links leading to a page. Third, it believes that organization is fundamental, and it uses this principle to classify the information it finds so you can find it better. And fourth, privacy is paramount; Cuil explains that it analyzes the web, not its users.
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