Cuil’s homepage.

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.

I have not had a chance to spend much date with the engine. I’m getting open access to it the same moment you are. I did get a preview. It’s a very serious effort, and it has abundant funding to get off the ground and become a player.

The most fundamental difference amidst Cuil and Google is its ranking system. Rather than assigning precedence to pages based on inbound hyperlinks as Google does (”Pagerank”), Cuil analyzes the substance of Web pages to divine their relevance to a search query. Costello bristled when I asked whether that 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.”

Cuil really does a better job of displaying search results.

(Credit: Cuil)

What that 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 aftereffect page where results for different individuals with that name are groups under tabs. It will plus break out sub-topics related to each name. In Cuil’s canned demo, whether 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.

The service additionally displays images from Web results whenever possible. It all adds up to search results pages that are much more appealing, and useful, than Google’s.

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 one go to refine its index, Cuil’s context-based search does not. In practice, the distinction may be moot considering Cuil will need to track clicks to see whether their results are actually working for society, but it could serve as a marketable distinction.

Context-based indexing additionally presents a juicier target for search spammers, but as Costello says, “that’s a success problem.”

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 things a lot as well. And that is where Cuil makes its boldest claim. Costello says that the engine is launching with 120 billion pages indexed, well by the 40 billion he says Google has (although see Google’s latest bluster about the company’s potential at Web indexing). Costello additionally claims that Cuil’s Web crawler is three times faster than Google’s, although it wasn’t clear to me whether he meant that is per search computer or for the entire system. Compared with Google’s globe-spanning documents network of goods centers, some literally set up approach dams so they can tap hydro ability more efficiently, Cuil’s two puny notes centers hosting less than 2,000 PCs total will have to run pretty fast to outpace Google’s crawlers.

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 abundant to use from day one.

It won’t, though, be as total as Google. While Google has had failures in extending its grade (Froogle, Google Base), its collection of services that are affiliated with its mainstream search product, like Google Maps, Image Search, and desktop search, can produce switching absent 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.

Upshot: Cuil is certainly worth trying out. whether you like it, services to put it in front of your face (a browser toolbar, and widgets) are coming soon.

As a trade proposition, Cuil is obviously a big bet. While search is a monetizable commerce, it’s tough to change the behavior of a generation of Web users who think “Google” is a verb. No other search engine has come shut to entering the public consciousness like that. Of course, Cuil doesn’t have to trounce Google on day one. It took Google fairly some instance to surpass Alta Vista and Yahoo in the search wars.

See additionally: Yahoo, Microsoft, Ask, Hakia, etc.

Original post by Rafe Needleman