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General Information

Websitecuil.com
CategoryWeb
Phone(650) 325 1701
Employees30
Founded1/05

Offices

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

People

CEO and Founder
President and Founder
VP of Engineering and Founder
Vice President of Product
VP of Communications
General Counsel
Head of Operations

Funding

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

Competitors

Tags

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 crashes immediately after launch owing it, apparently, to "overwhelming demand."
  • 7/28/08 — Cuil launches publicly

Products

Twiceler

Websitecuill.com/twiceler/robot.html

Twiceler is Cuill’s web crawler.

Traffic Analytics

Quantcast

Livegraph

Compete

Cuil

Comments

tyneham - August 11, 2008 at 11:08am
Most commentators here seem to compare chalk with cheese. Cuil is a new startup, lauched with $33m in August 2008. Cuil is not in the same league as Google (startup 1999) and Yahoo (startup 1993). Google still has less linked web pages compared with Yahoo, and both have W3C errors. MSN has none. Google was the fifth biggest US outfit and global brand #20 in 2007 when its stock market capitalization was $230 billion with annual revenue of $16 billion and $4 billion profits. For more info on Googe and Yahoo scams... http://tyneham.blogspot.com
O.B - August 5, 2008 at 8:22pm
For the sake of competition, I'd suggest we give Cuil the benefit of the doubt. Being a new Start up and all, its more than likely to experience a few glitches here and there, Giants like Google and Yahoo can't deny their errors in their early days. Hopefully, Cuil would pull through and add some excitement to the Search Engine Profile.
Arvindhen - July 30, 2008 at 3:16am
Think some fundamental changes are required. But for results nothing else can beat google. Not the black screen. So get more results. Then try for relavency. That should help you.
Graeme - July 29, 2008 at 8:02am
Right for the name close to "couille" in french ;-) But anyway, seems to have lots of pages in his index. Have some work to do for a better relevance, but it's normal for a young search engine. Long life to Cuil ;-)
Syd - July 28, 2008 at 10:40pm
I tried it, and I must admit that Cuil sucks! First the name "Cuil" sounds crappy in many languages other than English. For instance, it is close to "couille" in French...(I won't translate here, there could be children around). Then, while the concept and the interface looks cool (or "cuil" if you want), and I particularly like the different categories, it sucks at finding things. Oddly enough, it can't even find itself... For me, the future is more for things like Quintura (graphical interface that suits touchscreens).
Kris - July 28, 2008 at 4:47pm
let me write my own search engine and earn some money :)
SurfinSis - July 28, 2008 at 12:27pm
This is no where near as good as Google. I can't believe it will go anywhere. I had a hard time even finding the box to put my comment in.
Админ - July 28, 2008 at 12:20pm
ГАВНО !!!
Richard Wyatt - July 28, 2008 at 11:25am
No one can test a product at the scale it's going to used at, so, I'm cutting them some slack and will watch them carefully. I like their attitude though and if people would learn some patience I'm sure Cuil will be a contender. I'm old enough to remember when ALL of the search engines came out and they were, to a company, pathetic. So, sit back, let them shake out the bugs and see what happens. Otherwise, you might consider shutting up and writing your own search engine.
Doug F - July 28, 2008 at 10:38am
I like the format, but has a long way to go. Could be the next big thing < will see??????> At least the correct people are the head of this new ship.
Doug H. - July 28, 2008 at 10:01am
Cuill just plain does not work. It is filled with bugs. Even when I clicked on its "About Us" I got the message "Oops invalid URL for that page." I all for development and things new but you people have jumped into the water too soon with too many bugs.
Craig Key - July 28, 2008 at 9:52am
I agree with Marc. I'm throughoughly unimpressed. I tried for some keywords relevant to my business. For one, google has over 26 Million results (certainly only a small percentage of these are all that great--but still), while cuil returns zero results and tells me: "your search includes a term that is very rare. Try to find a more common substitute." Lame.
Bala G - July 28, 2008 at 9:38am
Google is right handed,Cuil is left handed ... "will need a lot of practice ",neways left hand practice will help ....
Marc - July 28, 2008 at 8:11am
I'll give it a few more attempts. First impression is lousy though. I tried searching for myself at first (being the egomaniac that I am). I come up on many pages in google, none in Cuil. Well, I'm not well known by any stretch of the imagination so that's ok. Then, however, I try searching for the Roman philosopher Plotinus. Again, nothing. Simply putting it into my Wikipedia search bar in Firefox gets me the info I want. If it hasn't indexed all of Wikipedia at a minimum, then Cuil should keep it's mouth closed and get to work before sounding the PR alarms for people to get interested. Most people have a short attention span, especially with searching. I have little reason to think Cuil will follow the other search "Dodos" right into extinction.

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