Cuill

Cuill is a stealth search engine startup which claims that it can index web pages significantly faster and cheaper than Google. 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. 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.

Tom Costello, CEO and Founder

Tom's breakthroughs in search architecture and relevance methods are at the core of Cuill's cool technology. Tom's work in search began in 1999 when he created Xift, a revolutionary search engine that introduced automatic clustering and page analysis. Tom later joined IBM where he developed the prototype of WebFountain. After WebFountain, Tom managed IBM business projects. He was a member of IBM's strategy team for Storage Systems Strategy worldwide and drove the development of the company's Homeland Security Strategy. Tom has a PhD in Computer Science from Stanford University and was on the Research faculty there until 2000.

Anna Patterson, President and Founder

Anna was the architect of Google's large search index, TeraGoogle, that launched in early 2006. While at Google, Anna was the technical lead of one of the two Web ranking groups at Google, in charge of GoogleBase, and the manager for the core piece of Google's ad-matching technology. She joined Google in 2004 after designing, writing and selling Recall - the largest search engine in existence at the time at 12 billion pages. Anna has a PhD in Computer Science from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. 

Russell Power, Founder

Russell was technical lead for the serving part of TeraGoogle. While at Google, he spent two years working on Web ranking and on the automatic Spam detection project. Russell attended the University of Washington and is on leave there as a PhD candidate in computer science.