posted by pittfall in search engines, search tech on September 9th, 2007
tags: cuill, google
Cuill Inc. (pronounced [kool]) is a startup company that is pioneering a new approach to Search.
What’s so special?
Cuill, the secretive search start-up — This is the latest start-up, started by two Google folks and two Stanford folks. Co-founders include Tom Costello, of Stanford, and Anna Patterson, formerly at Stanford and now at Google (described as a search wizard). They’re raising a VC round for the company. We’re told they claim they can crawl the Web at a tenth of the cost Google can. We’ve contacted Costello to find out more. We’re open to tips if you hear of anything.
from Venture Beat, Feb 12, 2007
The company’s main claim is that it can index web pages significantly faster and cheaper than Google can - 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.
Cuill 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, and Google must be fuming that their inventions were not added to Google’s intellectual property library. Costello was the founder of Xift.
Cuill 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 offices in Menlo Park.
Another rumor circulating is that Google already took a shot at acquiring the company with a very healthy offer, showing that they take this potential threat seriously. And the company may have enticed at least one other senior search scientist from Google to join them recently.
from TechCrunch, Sep 4, 2007
What would you do if you could do the same work as your largest competitor at 10 cents on the dollar?
Whether they can actually accomplish this remains to be seen, but if Google has taken notice it is for good reason. Two of the three founders have worked for Google and two out of three have a PhD in computer science (the other is on leave for his PhD).
They have released a very limited amount of information about their technology, in fact, they haven’t said much more than “Yup. We’re working on it.” (search that is). What they said is about their robot:
Twiceler is an experimental robot. The user-agent to block this is twiceler. It could take 24-48 hours for us to re-read your robots.txt file.
Apparently they are already indexing websites.
I look forward to the competition for Google. Could this be an answer for Yahoo, Ask or MSN search?
Little is known, but I am sure that buzz around Cuill will be heating up!
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This is one of the search startups that I’m really excited about. I’m a fan of Anna Patterson’s, and expect some good things out of the cuill gang.
September 9th, 2007 at 2:36 pm
Thanks Bill! Yeah, this start up has really caused a stir with me too! I am sure that there will be more info coming out in the next few months. With any project that is looking for funding usually requires results… so I guess we will see.
Cheers
September 10th, 2007 at 2:15 pm
I can verify that they are indeed indexing websites, as Twiceler-0.9 has been steadily accessing my website for the past 5+ hours.
September 12th, 2007 at 8:40 pm
Scott,
Thanks for the comment. The folks at Cuill have also released the ip addresses of their crawlers:
Their geographic locations are:
New York - New Jersey - class A 64 block
Texas - class A 38 block
Illinois - class A 208 block
Oh, and it looks like they are looking to hire more staff.
September 13th, 2007 at 11:03 am
Google killer definitely not, but they are killing my website at this moment… My website is getting bombarded by their bots and error logs on the websever are growing, looks like they are having major problems indexing my website.
September 17th, 2007 at 3:42 pm
Sam,
Thanks for the comment and I am sorry to hear that you are getting hit heavily and I am sure that there will be more quirks that they will have to clean up. Have you notified them of this issue?
September 18th, 2007 at 11:09 am
[...] watch out for Cuill, a search engine startup started by ex-Googlers which is currently in stealth mode and plans to [...]
September 20th, 2007 at 10:23 am
It has one of the worst behaved spiders out there. If the spider is indicative of the rest of there code then then Google is not going to be worried. Also given the rate that people are defensively blocking the spider from there sites it will never be anywhere near complete.
September 30th, 2007 at 5:22 pm
David,
Thank you for your comment. So far, there appears much to be desired, however I am sure that they have the capability to become much more than they are now. Does this mean that they will contend with Google (MSN or Yahoo for that matter)? Not yet.
October 1st, 2007 at 1:02 pm
they are indexing my websites too. i would like to know more about them and their targets in the web.
i like the personal touch of their website, specially with the picture of jim. i only don’t know who is jim ? is it the man behind the horses or is he one of them?
best regards from switzerland
roberto
October 22nd, 2007 at 11:25 pm
Roberto,
I imagine that they aren’t paying him in shoes and feed, but Cuill still have not given us much to look at… except for the strong horses!
October 23rd, 2007 at 11:06 am
Cuill not kool. Like most people, I’m tired of them. Their robot does not adhere to any standard to block them and they are not capable of handling UTF-8 encoding. I find it hard to believe that their software was written by anybody that has any legitimate programming experience.
November 1st, 2007 at 2:07 pm
Greg,
Thanks for the comment. I would suggest that until they have launched (or the smoke has cleared and they have gotten their crawlers under control).
Don’t risk your existing traffic.
November 4th, 2007 at 2:26 am
I would have to concur with the above statements. I banned them from my site last night, but did send them an email explaining why and to be fair did get a response. I have since replied, giving a more in depth explanation why I felt this action was necessary. BTW according to the email I received Jim is a guy called James Akers.
I for one would not like to make negative comments at this stage but in all honesty they were crawling my site nearly 24/7, and I was starting to have some problems. Hope that they can resolve the issues they are currently having because at the moment they are no inspiring confidence
November 6th, 2007 at 11:01 am
Vanessa,
I would like to concur, making negative comments at this time might just be premature, however, there is still very little information that they are have provided since the launch (sorry, no launch). I thank you for the comment, but I am still waiting for more information, as I am sure that many are!
November 11th, 2007 at 10:05 pm
Today Cuill raised another $25 Mil second round. I can’t wait to see the result of an impressive team. It’s definitely interesting to see more startups from ex-Googlers like Cuill, FriendFeed.
April 15th, 2008 at 2:28 pm
Some say ‘Cuill’, others say ‘Cuil’. The logo at the start of this article shows ‘Cuill’, but the site is ‘Cuil’. Seems like a poor start if they can’t even get their branding simple to start with.
July 29th, 2008 at 8:48 am