Former Google engineers launch new search engine
Submitted by zeljko on Tue, 07/29/2008 - 23:20
Can you believe that someone is trying to break the Google’s dominance on the search engine market and has announced that two days ago? No, you are wrong – no one of the so called "big names" are involved. But you should probably remember this two: www.cuil.com and Anna Patterson.
What is interesting about this search engine is the story behind. It tells the very basic thing, that 99% of CEO’s around the world preach, perhaps 10% of them believe and less then 1% put to practice: the people involved in your projects are the only real capital that you have in your company, everything else is easily expandable.
Measured through its ambitions, Cuil is relatively small startup of Anna Peterson, who has a solid academic carieer behind. She got attention of Google after creating relatively big search engine index over entries in www.archive.org, and from 2004 to 2006 she was a Google employee on key positions in some of the core projects of Google.
Thereafter, she left Google and took some very interesting people with her: her husband, Tom Costello (specialist in non-monotonic reasoning and heuristics), Louis Monier (also former AltaVista and Ebay search engine architect) and Russell Power, a technical lead for the serving part of TeraGoogle. They together founded the Cuil Inc. and got some venture capital to start with.
Last three years Cuil Inc. spent away from media coverage (a bit surprising if you think about the capacity of involved people) – until 2 days ago. The search engine started, then crashed under user pressure, thenafter was supported with additional hardware on the rush – and it works today surprisingly good. After trying several search phrases in Google and Cuil, Cuil behaves better for me – not to mention the way the information are presented. You should try it… it is not easy to describe it, but that "news column lay-outing" of search result is something that makes me think “Why in a world had no one ever before think of that?”.
The market has its own mechanism, and it is going to take a while that people really start to use Cuil. But it is going to come to become a player, that is for sure – this is, after all, the very first attack on Google’s position from some of its former employees… I was of course a bit disappointed that some of the keywords that ranks MontenaSoft in Google searches very high do not work so good in Cuil. Luckily, other Drupal focused companies also did not perform very well ;-). So if you are looking for a project in Drupal that you can start and lead, try with SEO optimization techniques for Cuil – there are good chances that you can create yourself a sponsored job.
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Comments
Hey, finally we got a women inside the IT!!!
Hi folks,
nice blog entry, and an interesting subject too, I must say that I feel a bit uncomfortable about the google's dominance in the market (and our lifes, too).
Have you noticed that this is the first time that some brand new start-up has been led by a woman (at least as I have heard)?
Cheers,
maria3
Re: Hey, finally we got a women inside the IT!!!
hi maria3,
Thanks for your input, it was inspiring. Here are some comments of mine:
1) On Google: I agree with you that such market position like Google has could also be a drawback for the users. Any kind of monopoly attracts sooner or later the people and organizations that would like to abuse it. We do not know too much about Google’s policy, but they are certainly trying to cover the information sky with their products – as much as they can. So, is there some space for conspiracy theories? Perhaps… from the other hand, Google is (legally speaking) a registered company, and as such must obey the laws. At least as I know, Google agrees to give away information about its users only under the pressure of court decision (like in this example in Israel), and that is far more then other famous search engine companies do to protect the privacy of users, to say it the least.
Google is also helping the programming community by sponsoring variety of open source project (Google Summer of Codeis the most famous example). OK, they will get access to potential employees, and yes, someone can also say that this is another example of trying to control the community and future directions of open source software development. But compare that again to their main competitors…
2) On woman in IT: yes, if you’re looking in the leading positions in IT start-ups, you will not find too much female personal. Tradition? Or is the job so stupid and so boring, that only a man can stick to it ? ;-)))
… I really do not know the answer. But I think that comes on person, not on sex. What impressed me the most about Cuil is that Anna Patterson has managed to become 4 (four) children with all the rest in her life. So, why am I not so productive in my life as she is in hers? Am I lazy, or am I just another stupid male person? I prefer first answer, because I can change something on it ;-)))
Cheers, Zeljko
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