Google vs. Cuil: The Search Engines War is On!

The war on the best search engines in the Internet is on as former Google computer engineers launched Sunday night their own search engine baptized as “Cuil” (pronounced as ‘cool’) to go head to head with the famous money-making Google search engine.

CNET and bizjournal.org reported that Cuil is the brainchild of husband-and-wife team of Standford professor Tom Costello and Anna Patterson as well as Russell Power and Louis Monier. Costello was the one who researched and developed the search engines at Standford University and IBM while his wife Patterson was the search engine architect who worked with Power at Google in 2004 after the company bought a previous search index she developed called “Recall.” Power, the third co-founder of Cuil, Inc. also worked at Google on search indexing, web ranking and spam detection while Monier is the former chief technology officer of the search engine Google supplanted in the late 1990s, Alta Vista, and who helped with eBay Inc.’s search engine for its online auction site.

With such formidable parents, Cuil is expected to do better than Google’s search engine. Its makers are already claiming that Cuil indexes three times as many web pages as Google. Cuil has reportedly indexed 120 billion web pages and can provide results organized by ideas with complete privacy for users as it does not retain information about its users search histories or surfing patterns unlike the Mountain View-based Google. Cuil said its search engine even goes beyond what it refers to as traditional approaches in indexing web pages as it analyzes the context of each page and the concepts behind each query so that it can provide better rankings by content rather than popularity. Moreover, Cuil’s results are organized into groups and sorted into categories. It also offers tabs to clarify subjects and suggestions on how to refine searches.

Just last January this year, Google already crossed swords when Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales unleashed his Wikia Search. Wales is hoping that it can provide better search results by allowing a community of users to index pages by using their Web page rankings and other suggestions.

All in all, the war on the best search engine in the Internet is now on. The above former Google engineers who made Cuil will not just sit idle to see their new baby crashed by the same giant they themselves nurtured in the past. It will indeed be a war. A long war.