Wall Street Journal: Former Google Engineers Launch Search Engine

Former Googleites are in the news everywhere today regarding their launch of a search engine. Cuil, as you’ll find out from the excerpt of a story written by Jessica E. Vascellaro, is supposed to deliver better results.
It’s great that Cuil searches more than Google. I encountered problems with a simple search such as the additional of thumbnail illustrations that have no relationship to the search topic. In addition, many of the results just didn’t relate to what I was searching. Cuil also took much longer than Google to give me those results.
The Cuil privacy policy is attractive. The company won’t collect personal information about users.
As Vascellaro notes, the company has secured $33M in funding – which makes it all the more surprising that the engineers working on the company didn’t feel accuracy was important.
Here’s an excerpt from Vascellaro’s story:
“A startup founded by engineers from Google Inc. and other tech giants is launching a search engine that claims to cover three times as many Web pages as Google.
The startup, Cuil Inc., plans to launch its product (www.cuil.com) Monday and aims to deliver better results than other major search engines by searching across more Web pages and studying them more accurately. The site’s results page resembles an online magazine — a different look and feel from search juggernaut Google’s.
“You can’t be an alternative search engine and smaller,” said Anna Patterson, Cuil co-founder and president, and one of the engineers who helped build Google’s search index. “You have to be an alternative and bigger.””
Read the rest here.