complete computer desktop google index
There’s a big new search engine launching Monday: Cuil. Developed and run by the husband-and-wife team of Stanford professor Tom Costello and former Google search architect Anna Patterson, it’s pitched as bigger, faster, and better than Google’s flagship search engine in pretty much every way. See video interview with Tom Costello, below.
See also: Yahoo, Microsoft, Ask, Hakia, etc.
Cuil will launch on Monday, and in a refreshing (and gutsy) move, the site is just plain launching. There’s no weasely “beta” tag applied to the service. Costello thinks it’ll be good enough to use from day one.
I have not had a chance to spend much time with the engine. I’m getting open access to it the same time you are. I did get a preview. It’s a very serious effort, and it has enough funding to get off the ground and become a player.
The most important difference between Cuil and Google is its ranking system. Rather than assigning priority to pages based on inbound links as Google does (”Pagerank”), Cuil analyzes the content of Web pages to divine their relevance to a search query. Costello bristled when I asked if this was a semantic search engine like PowerSet (recently sold to Microsoft). Costello said Cuil’s search is “contextual,” and that, “we’re trying to understand the real world, not the Web.”
Upshot: Cuil is certainly worth trying out. If you like it, services to put it in front of your face (a browser toolbar, and widgets) are coming soon.
Another potential advantage of the context-based search is that it allows Cuil searches to be more respectful of user privacy. Unlike Google, which simply has to track every single click to refine its index, Cuil’s context-based search does not. In practice, the distinction may be moot because Cuil will need to track clicks to see if their results are actually working for people, but it could serve as a marketable distinction.
(Credit:
Cuil)
Context-based indexing also presents a juicier target for search spammers, but as Costello says, “that’s a success problem.”
Cuil's homepage.
The service also displays images from Web results whenever possible. It all adds up to search results pages that are much more attractive, and useful, than Google’s.
Cuil really does a better job of displaying search results.
It won’t, though, be as complete as Google. While Google has had failures in extending its brand (Froogle, Google Base), its collection of services that are affiliated with its mainstream search product, like Google Maps, Image Search, and desktop search, can make switching away from Google difficult for users. Costello realizes that Cuil needs to layer in additional services, but as he said to me, the company has to start somewhere.
What this means, in the real world, is that Cuil results are automatically categorized. When you search for a common name, for example, Cuil will give you a result page where results for different individuals with that name are groups under tabs. It will also break out sub-topics related to each name. In Cuil’s canned demo, if you search for “Harry,” there are different tabs for “Harry Potter” and “Prince Harry of Wales.” On the Harry Potter tab, you’ll get further sub-links devoted to actors, Gryffindor dorm-mates, etc. “We have a strong ontological commitment,” Costello told me, meaning that parsing search results into readable chunks is a very big part of the Cuil value proposition.
It’s one thing to have a nice interface and show users good results, but the size of the Web index that the engine has access to matters a lot as well. And this is where Cuil makes its boldest claim. Costello says that the engine is launching with 120 billion pages indexed, well over the 40 billion he says Google has (although see Google’s latest bluster about the company’s power at Web indexing). Costello also claims that Cuil’s Web crawler is three times faster than Google’s, although it wasn’t clear to me if he meant that is per search computer or for the entire system. Compared with Google’s globe-spanning data network of data centers, some literally set up near dams so they can tap hydro power more efficiently, Cuil’s two puny data centers hosting less than 2,000 PCs total will have to run pretty fast to outpace Google’s crawlers.
As a business proposition, Cuil is obviously a big bet. While search is a monetizable business, it’s hard to change the behavior of a generation of Web users who think “Google” is a verb. No other search engine has come close to entering the public consciousness like this. Of course, Cuil doesn’t have to trounce Google on day one. It took Google quite some time to surpass Alta Vista and Yahoo in the search wars.
In case you missed it: $SUBJECT is the percentage of contribution to the GNOME codebase. Thanks, Dave Neary.
An upside of not working for Red Hat anymore: I can speak frankly about this kind of issue, since no one really cares what I think anymore. I’m just another cranky dude with a blog.
If you doubt, for a nanosecond, that Canonical is a marketing organization masquerading as an engineering organization, then you’re either an unapologetic Ubuntu fanboy or you’re not paying attention.
One of the most irritating things about working at Red Hat was watching Canonical take credit for code that Red Hat engineers wrote. Of course, Red Hat engineers, being the upstanding sort of chaps that they are, never said a word about it, because they’ve always been too busy carrying the load — and it’s really never made sense for Red Hatters to complain much about it anyway, because it’s not the sort of discussion that ever benefits the complaining party. “You’re just mad because Ubuntu’s cooler than you,” the masses would say, and to be fair, there’s always been something to that.
But this figure is absolutely egregious.
I mean, I always knew that Red Hat put in a lot of work into GNOME, because I saw it every day — but until now, I thought that Canonical *also* put a lot of work into GNOME. They’ve certainly given the impression, over the last several years, of having put a lot of work into GNOME. They’ve been very successful at positioning themselves as the Eternal Champion of the Linux Desktop, and positioning Red Hat as the boring old has-beens who long ago abandoned the Desktop fight, and just do backroom server work that Real Linux People don’t care about.
So let’s call it plain. Canonical has been riding on Red Hat’s coattails for years — not just down in kernel land, but also, we now learn, all the way up to the tippy tippy top of user space. Not only that, but they then have the gall to suggest that Red Hat should change its release schedules to make it even easier for them to ride the gravy train (while at the same time making the spectacularly outrageous claim that Red Hat is actually a proprietary software company — LOLWUT???)
They’ve done an exceptionally good job with this sleight of hand, but the facts are the facts, aren’t they?
In the ONE area where Canonical claims to have the MOST customer focus and the MOST engineering expertise, Red Hat still outproduces them ***16 TO 1***.
OMFG, SRSLY? SIXTEEN TO ONE!!11!!11!!one!!!!!
If anyone at Canonical even bothers to respond to this analysis (which I doubt they will), I’m sure it’ll be the same old song-and-dance about how everyone collaborates, and everyone competes, and everyone wins, and the strength of the open source model, and not a fair comparison because Red Hat is so much bigger, and distro wars are bad, and can’t we all be friends, and yadda yadda yadda.
Yeah, yeah. I know. Spare me. The world is full of talkers and doers, and in the long haul, people are usually smart enough to figure out which is which. Which probably explains why Red Hat has a billion dollars of cash in the bank, while Canonical is still continually reinventing itself to make any profits at all.
