Jul 28 2008
CUIL Launches

Cuil

Cuil is a stealth search engine startup which claims that it can index web pages significantly faster and cheaper than Google. Cuill has told potential investors that their indexing costs will be 1/10th of Google’s, based on new search architectures and relevance methods. In some ways Cuill is the polar opposite of Powerset, which has huge indexing costs because it does a deep contextual analysis on every sentence on every web page. Powerset’s indexing costs, therefore, should be much higher per web page than Google’s.

Cuil was also founded by highly respected search experts. Husband and wife team Tom Costello and Anna Patterson were joined by Russell Power. Patterson and Power are ex-Google search experts. Costello was the founder of Xift.

Cuil met with venture capitalists, but we’re hearing that Costello and Patterson eventually self-funded the company with a $5ish million injection of capital. They now have 10-15 employees and an office in Menlo Park.

Milestones

  • 7/28/08 — Cuil launches publicly 3

Products

Twiceler

Website cuill.com/twiceler/robot.html

Twiceler is Cuill’s web crawler.

Traffic Analytics

Quantcast

Website cuil.com
Category Web
Phone (650) 325 1701
Employees 30new LinkedIn.CompanyInsiderPopup(“linkedin”, “Cuil”);
Founded 2005

Offices

[map] Menlo Park, USA
66 Willow Place
Menlo Park, 94025, USA

People

Co-founder, CEO
Co-founder, VP of Engineering
Co-founder
Vice President of Product

Funding

Total $33M
Series A, 3/07 1
Greylock
Tugboat Ventures
$8M
Series B, 4/08 2
Greylock
Madrone Capital Partners
Tugboat Ventures
$25M

Competitors

Tags

Welcome to Cuil—the world’s biggest search engine. The Internet has grown. We think it’s time search did too.

The Internet has grown exponentially in the last fifteen years but search engines have not kept up—until now. Cuil searches more pages on the Web than anyone else—three times as many as Google and ten times as many as Microsoft.

Rather than rely on superficial popularity metrics, Cuil searches for and ranks pages based on their content and relevance. When we find a page with your keywords, we stay on that page and analyze the rest of its content, its concepts, their inter-relationships and the page’s coherency.

Then we offer you helpful choices and suggestions until you find the page you want and that you know is out there. We believe that analyzing the Web rather than our users is a more useful approach, so we don’t collect data about you and your habits, lest we are tempted to peek. With Cuil, your search history is always private.

Cuil is an old Irish word for knowledge. For knowledge, ask Cuil.

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