Cuil’s privacy policy, unlike that of other search engines, says it does not store users’ search activity or IP addresses

Cuil is managed and developed largely by former employees of Google: Anna Patterson, Russell Power. The CEO and co-founder, Tom Costello, has worked for IBM and others. The company raised $33 million from venture capital firms including Greylock.

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 called Finn McCuill. The company says that Cuil is Irish for knowledge and hazel.

Some linguists are unsure of this derivation and pronunciation, and note that the modern Irish word for hazel is spelled coll (coill or cuill in genitive form, the former spelling having superseded the latter as a result of the Caighdeán Oifigiúil reforms of the mid-twentieth century).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, the official governing body of the Irish language, doubted 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.

The company name had previously been spelled Cuill.

Launch

Cuil’s launch (with an index of 121,617,892,992 web pages) 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, inappropriately pornographic images displayed alongside search results. Danny Sullivan of Search Engine Watch 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. Despite reported problems with search results, Net Applications reported that for the last three days of July, Cuil beat Google and Yahoo in the amount of time spent on a site after referral from a search engine, a key metric for relevancy of search results.

According to an interview with a Cuil representative, while other Web 2.0 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. Website owners were reportedly saying the method was not “scientific in any way” and “actually quite ‘amateurish.’”

According to the Alexa web information company, 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. About one month after launch, Cuil’s Product VP and renowned search technologist, Louis Monier, quit the company citing disagreements with the CEO, Tom Costello.

Criticism

Since launch, Cuil’s search results tend to display seemingly random images. This was noticed by several bloggers. Even months after its launch, incorrect images appear with some web sites as they did at launch. A Gmail logo is still shown for a blogging site, TechCrunch.

Contact Information

• Type of site  search engine
• Available language(s)  English
• Owner  Cuil, Inc.
• Launched  July 28, 2008

Visit Cuil

The company’s early products were an SMB search engine and Scour Media Agent, a Windows application to download files from SMB shares. The search engine would probe IP addresses for publicly shared files and then index them for download by other users.

In 1998, the company developed a web search engine as well, crawling the World Wide Web for links to multimedia — audio, video and images.

In 1999 Scour received an investment from Michael Ovitz and the Yucaipa Company, an investment arm of the billionaire Ronald Burkle. Together, the total investment represented a controlling share in the company. After the investment, Scour expanded in terms of product offerings and personnel. The company launched a software product named MyCaster which allowed users to stream audio over the network, optionally mixing microphone input with an MP3 audio file in real time.

Faced with the increasing popularity of Napster, Scour developed a competing peer-to-peer service named Scour Exchange. Unlike Napster, the Scour software supported video and images in addition to just audio files, and integrated all users into one network. The company also tied its web site promotional materials to the Scour Exchange software and attempted to leverage its web and SMB indexes in providing additional search results inside the Scour Exchange application.

In the summer of 2000 the Motion Picture Association of America, the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) and the National Music Publishers Association (NMPA) brought a lawsuit against Scour, alleging copyright infringement. Despite Scour’s declarations of innocence, the company was not able to raise money to continue operations. They laid off most of its staff in September of that year and filed for bankruptcy protection, to protect itself from the lawsuit, shortly afterwards. The company’s assets went up for auction and, following a bidding war, all assets were purchased by Centerspan Communications of Portland, Oregon in late December of that year.

Scour metasearch engine

Scour has since relaunched in early 2008, as a metasearch engine combining the three most used search engines: Google, Yahoo and Live Search. They plan to reward users with a certain point value for each search conducted through Scour Toolbar and at the website. Users have to be logged in to get credit for their searches. Once users have accumalated a certain amount of points they can be redeemed for cash.

Visit Scour

Mahalo’s directory employs human editors to review websites and write search engine results pages that include text listings, as well as other media, such as photos and video. Each Mahalo search results page includes links to the top seven sites, as well as other categorized information, and additional web pages from Google. The company also pays freelancers to create pages for piecework compensation in the Mahalo Greenhouse – the pages are approved by a full time staff member prior to appearing in the main index.

Mahalo’s approach is similar to that employed by Ask.com in 1998. At that time, both Ask.com and Google were up-and-coming search engines. Ultimately, Google prevailed because Ask had trouble scaling up its human edited directory, while Google’s search results were generated by software

Mahalo has started with the top 4,000 search terms in popular categories like travel, entertainment, cars, food, health care and sports and is adding about 500 more terms per week with a goal of covering the top 10,000 by the end of 2007. This goal has been exceeded when, in December 2007, Mahalo announced that its index has reached 25,000 pages, a year earlier than it was expected.

Mahalo also offers “how to” guides offering instructions on popular topics in an editorial fashion. Mahalo will deliver results for less popular searches from Google.

Search results quality

Mahalo’s goal is to improve search results by eliminating search spam from low-quality websites, such as those that have excessive advertising, distribute malware, or engage in phishing scams. Webmasters have a vested interest to see their sites listed. Calacanis has said that algorithmic search engines, like Google and Yahoo, suffer from manipulation by search engine optimization practitioners. Mahalo’s reliance on human editors is intended to avoid this problem, producing search results that are more relevant to the user.

Mahalo Daily Video Show

Veronica Belmont was hired by Mahalo.com to produce a daily video show for the site. Her first video was an interview with Leeroy Jenkins. Belmont left Mahalo Daily to co-host the Revision3 series Tekzilla. After a month-long search, Belmont’s replacement was announced on June 5, 2008. Former cable sports show host Leah D’Emilio won Mahalo Vlog Idol and now co-hosts the show with Mahalo.com employee Lon Harris. The show format remains predominately the same as when hosted by Belmont – shows around five minutes long, intended to be both entertaining and generally educational. Shows regularly feature interviews, particularly of people in the local area, and “in 60 seconds” clips of major events (Apple Keynotes, US Presidential debates, and so forth) regularly feature. Harris and D’Emilo have introduced two new features to the show lineup – a “This week on YouTube” show each Friday, covering (in a disparaging fashion) viral videos on Youtube for that current week, and a “Mahalo Mondays” Q&A show each Monday.

Mahalo Answers

On December 15, 2008, Mahalo launched a new service called Mahalo Answers. The service is similar to Yahoo! Answers in that it allows users to pose questions regarding a wide variety of subjects, and those questions will be answered by other users. A key difference between the two services is that Mahalo Answers allows questioners to give a monetary reward (called a “tip” on the site) to the user who provides the most helpful response.  Tips are paid using “Mahalo dollars,” which are bought using PayPal, and, once earned, can then either be used to tip other users or be cashed in at a 75% exchange rate.

Critics

Jim Lanzone, CEO of Ask.com said, “Just like a lot of people who watch movies think they can be scriptwriters, there are a lot of people who use search engines who think they can build a search engine.” Lanzone cited the fact that about 60% of search inquiries to Ask are unique as just one of the challenges of running a search engine. Google claims that 20% to 25% of its search inquiries have never been used before.

At the SMX Conference in June 2007, Google software engineer Matt Cutts explained that while he supports different approaches to search, like Mahalo, it is untrue that humans have nothing to do with Google’s search results. As examples of human involvement he cited Google’s use of hyperlink analysis, toolbar voting, and user reporting of spam. Cutts suggested that Google would evolve to take advantage of social media.

Ownership and funding

Lead investors in Mahalo.com include Sequoia Capital’s Michael Moritz, an early investor in both Google and Yahoo; Elon Musk, founder of PayPal; and News Corporation. Other disclosed investors include Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban and AOL chairman Ted Leonsis Jason Calacanis has said that he has enough funding to run Mahalo for four or five years without making a profit. Mahalo eventually hopes to make a profit by selling ads next to search results.

Traffic and growth

Mahalo has experienced moderate growth since it was launched in May 2007. Mahalo.com traffic has increased from roughly ten thousand visitors a month in July 2007, to two million visitors a month in January 2008.  In the three month period leading up to the date of February 23 2008, the number of global internet users who visited Mahalo.com rose by fifty percent, and the site is currently ranked by Alexa in the top 3000 most visited websites. On October 22, 2008, Calacanis announced that he was laying off 10 percent of Mahalo’s employees due to the economic downturn. Conflicting reports suggest that the percentage of employees let go was much higher, with reports stating that it was a third of staff.

Other Information

• Genre  Search Engine
• Founded  2007
• Founder  Jason Calacanis
• Headquarters  Santa Monica, California, USA
• Key people  Jason Calacanis, Founding CEO. Elliot C.R. Cook: COO, Mark Jeffrey: CTO
• Revenue  Unknown, Startup May 2007
• Employees  20
• Slogan  “We’re here to help.”
• Type of site  Web directory
• Advertising  Google AdSense
• Available in  English
• Launched  May 30, 2007

Links

• Website  Mahalo.com