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Cuil ( ) was a
search engine A search engine is a software system designed to carry out web searches. They search the World Wide Web in a systematic way for particular information specified in a textual web search query. The search results are generally presented in a ...
that organized web pages by content and displayed relatively long entries along with
thumbnail Thumbnails are reduced-size versions of pictures or videos, used to help in recognizing and organizing them, serving the same role for images as a normal text index does for words. In the age of digital images, visual search engines and imag ...
pictures for many results. Cuil said it had a larger index than any other
search engine A search engine is a software system designed to carry out web searches. They search the World Wide Web in a systematic way for particular information specified in a textual web search query. The search results are generally presented in a ...
, with about 120 billion web pages.Liedtke, Michael
"Ex-Google engineers debut 'Cuil' way to search"
Associated Press, 28 July 2008, retrieved 13 December 2009
It went live on July 28, 2008. Cuil's servers were shut down on September 17, 2010, with later confirmations the service had ended. Cuil was managed and developed largely by former employees of
Google Google LLC () is an American Multinational corporation, multinational technology company focusing on Search Engine, search engine technology, online advertising, cloud computing, software, computer software, quantum computing, e-commerce, ar ...
, Anna Patterson and Russell Power. The
CEO A chief executive officer (CEO), also known as a central executive officer (CEO), chief administrator officer (CAO) or just chief executive (CE), is one of a number of corporate executives charged with the management of an organization especially ...
and co-founder, Tom Costello, has worked for IBM and others. Cuil's privacy policy, unlike that of other search engines, said it did not store users' search activity or
IP addresses An Internet Protocol address (IP address) is a numerical label such as that is connected to a computer network that uses the Internet Protocol for communication.. Updated by . An IP address serves two main functions: network interface ident ...
.Your privacy
Cuil, Last Modified: July 13, 2009


Name

The Irish ancestry of Anna Patterson's husband Tom Costello sparked the name ''Cuil'', which the company states is taken from a series of Celtic folklore stories involving a character,
Fionn mac Cumhaill Fionn mac Cumhaill ( ; Old and mga, Find or ''mac Cumail'' or ''mac Umaill''), often anglicized Finn McCool or MacCool, is a hero in Irish mythology, as well as in later Scottish and Manx folklore. He is leader of the ''Fianna'' bands of y ...
, they erroneously refer to as Finn MacCuil. The company says that ''Cuil'' is Irish for "knowledge" and "
hazel The hazel (''Corylus'') is a genus of deciduous trees and large shrubs native to the temperate Northern Hemisphere. The genus is usually placed in the birch family Betulaceae,Germplasmgobills Information Network''Corylus''Rushforth, K. (1999). ...
". Some linguists are unsure of this derivation and pronunciation, and note that the modern Irish word for "hazel" is spelled ''
coll Coll (; gd, Cola; sco, Coll)Mac an Tàilleir (2003) p. 31 is an island located west of the Isle of Mull in the Inner Hebrides of Scotland. Coll is known for its sandy beaches, which rise to form large sand dunes, for its corncrakes, and for ...
'' (''coill'' or ''cuill'' in genitive form, the former spelling having superseded the latter as a result of the '' Caighdeán Oifigiúil'' reforms of the mid-twentieth century).
Foras na Gaeilge (, " Irish Institute"; ) is a public body responsible for the promotion of the Irish language throughout the island of Ireland, including both the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland. It was set up on 2 December 1999, assuming the role ...
, the official governing body of the Irish language, did not support the assertion that ''cuil'' means "knowledge". "I am unaware myself of the meaning 'knowledge' being with the word 'cuil' in Irish", Stiofán Ó Deoráin, an official on Foras na Gaeilge's terminology committee, said. Even pre-Caighdeán dictionaries such as Dineen do not associate the ''cuil'' spelling with knowledge or hazel. Dinneen only lists two nouns and one adjective with the spelling ''cuil'': "''f.'', a fly, a horse-fly...", "''f.'', a venomous aspect; great eagerness..." and "''gs.'' of col, as ''a.'', wicked." The company name had previously been spelled ''Cuill''.


History

Cuil launched in July 2008 with an index of 121,617,892,992 web pages. About one month after launch, Cuil's product VP and search technologist, Louis Monier, quit the company citing disagreements with the CEO, Tom Costello. On December 19, 2008, ''
BusinessWeek ''Bloomberg Businessweek'', previously known as ''BusinessWeek'', is an American weekly business magazine published fifty times a year. Since 2009, the magazine is owned by New York City-based Bloomberg L.P. The magazine debuted in New York City ...
'' listed Cuil as one of the most successful U.S. startups of 2008, based on the amount of money they raised. As of February 2009, Cuil had 127 billion indexed pages. According to
Alexa Alexa may refer to: Technology *Amazon Alexa, a virtual assistant developed by Amazon * Alexa Internet, a defunct website ranking and traffic analysis service * Arri Alexa, a digital motion picture camera People * Alexa (name), a given name a ...
, the site reached a peak of just over 0.2% of worldwide internet users in late July 2008 and by September 12, 2008, it had dropped to 0.02% and ranked as the 5,340th site by traffic. By October 13, 2008, it had dropped to 0.005% and ranked as the 21,960th site in traffic.


Shutdown

''
PC Magazine ''PC Magazine'' (shortened as ''PCMag'') is an American computer magazine published by Ziff Davis. A print edition was published from 1982 to January 2009. Publication of online editions started in late 1994 and have continued to the presen ...
'' reported that on the morning of September 17, 2010 "employees were told about Cuil's demise ... and the servers were taken offline five hours later." Laid-off employees were told they would not be paid. The shutdown reportedly came after an acquisition agreement fell through earlier in the week. Their patents were sold to Google and Anna Patterson returned to Google to work for its Search Engine department.


Features

A user could log into their
Facebook Facebook is an online social media and social networking service owned by American company Meta Platforms. Founded in 2004 by Mark Zuckerberg with fellow Harvard College students and roommates Eduardo Saverin, Andrew McCollum, Dust ...
account via Cuil, which would then search friend updates for topics, with search links. A user could also send messages to their friends through Cuil. Cuil worked on an automated encyclopedia called Cpedia, built by algorithmically summarizing and clustering ideas on the web to create encyclopedia-like reports. Instead of displaying search results, Cuil would show Cpedia articles matching the searched terms. This was meant to reduce duplication by combining information into one document. Cuil was available in 8 languages:
English English usually refers to: * English language * English people English may also refer to: Peoples, culture, and language * ''English'', an adjective for something of, from, or related to England ** English national ...
,
French French (french: français(e), link=no) may refer to: * Something of, from, or related to France ** French language, which originated in France, and its various dialects and accents ** French people, a nation and ethnic group identified with Franc ...
,
German German(s) may refer to: * Germany (of or related to) **Germania (historical use) * Germans, citizens of Germany, people of German ancestry, or native speakers of the German language ** For citizens of Germany, see also German nationality law **Ge ...
,
Italian Italian(s) may refer to: * Anything of, from, or related to the people of Italy over the centuries ** Italians, an ethnic group or simply a citizen of the Italian Republic or Italian Kingdom ** Italian language, a Romance language *** Regional Ita ...
, Polish, Portuguese,
Spanish Spanish might refer to: * Items from or related to Spain: **Spaniards are a nation and ethnic group indigenous to Spain **Spanish language, spoken in Spain and many Latin American countries **Spanish cuisine Other places * Spanish, Ontario, Can ...
and Turkish, with more planned for the future.


Criticism

Cuil received widely critical press coverage. Concerns were expressed about the website's slow response times, irrelevant or wrong search results and in at least one case, irrelevant pornographic images displayed alongside search results.
Danny Sullivan Daniel John Sullivan III (born March 9, 1950), better known as Danny Sullivan, is an American former racing driver. He earned 17 wins in the CART Indy Car World Series, including the 1985 Indianapolis 500. Sullivan won the 1988 CART Champions ...
of
Search Engine Watch Search Engine Watch (SEW) provides news and information about search engines and search engine marketing. Search Engine Watch was started by Danny Sullivan in 1996. In 1997, Sullivan sold it for an undisclosed amount to Mecklermedia (now WebM ...
questioned the validity of Cuil's claim that it had the world's largest search engine index and criticized it for focusing on size rather than
relevance Relevance is the concept of one topic being connected to another topic in a way that makes it useful to consider the second topic when considering the first. The concept of relevance is studied in many different fields, including cognitive sc ...
. However, despite reported problems with search results, Net Applications reported that for the last three days of July 2008, Cuil beat Google and Yahoo in the amount of time spent on a site after referral from a search engine. According to an interview with a Cuil representative, while other
Web 2.0 Web 2.0 (also known as participative (or participatory) web and social web) refers to websites that emphasize user-generated content, ease of use, participatory culture and interoperability (i.e., compatibility with other products, systems, and ...
launches using massively parallel processing might fail with a slow down or crash, Cuil's architecture was responding with incomplete, "less-than-relevant results that then appear at the top of users' pages." Cuil's VP of communications Vince Sollitto said the search engine was experiencing heavy first-day overloads and they were "busy putting out fires." Sollitto said Cuil "will only improve with time. It's day one. Traffic is massive. We're new. There are bugs to fix, results to improve." After the initial critical press coverage, Cuil was alleged to have caused issues for some websites, owing to how the Cuil indexing robot polled certain sites (including under its pre-release name, ''Cuill''). Many website owners reported that the Twiceler crawler repeatedly hit their site with randomly generated URLs in an attempt to find pages inaccessible by links. Others reported irrelevant images associated with their listing in Cuil's search results.


See also

*
List of search engines Search engines, including web search engines, selection-based search engines, metasearch engines, desktop search tools, and web portals and vertical market websites have a search facility for online databases. By content/topic General ...


References

{{Web search engines


External links


Cuil
Defunct American websites Internet properties established in 2008 Internet properties disestablished in 2010 Defunct internet search engines Defunct online companies of the United States