Former Employees of Google Prepare Rival Search Engine

前Google员工推出竞争搜索引擎

By MIGUEL HELFT

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/28/technology/28cool.html?_r=1&ref=business&pagewanted=print&oref=slogin

SAN FRANCISCO — In her two years at Google, Anna Patterson helped design and build some of the pillars of the company’s search engine, including its large index of Web pages and some of the formulas it uses for ranking search results.

圣弗朗西斯科-在Google工作的两年里Anna Patterson帮助设计搭建了公司的搜索引擎的支柱，包括庞大的网页检索和一些搜索结果排名的程式。

Now, along with her husband, Tom Costello, and a few other Google alumni, she is trying to upstage her former employer.

现在她和她的老公Tom Costello，还有另外几名前Google同事在一起打算强她前东家的镜头。

On Monday, their company, Cuil, is unveiling a search engine that they promise will be more comprehensive than Google’s and that they hope will give its users more relevant results.

星期一他们的公司Cuil发布了一款搜索引擎，据他们说这款搜索引擎比Google的还要全面，他们希望提供给用户相关性更好的结果。

“I think it will be better,” Mr. Costello said in an interview. “But there is no question that the public has to decide.”

Costello先生在一次采访中说，“我认为它会变得更好，但是要由公众来下这个结论。”

Cuil, pronounced “cool,” is only the latest in a long string of start-up companies that have been founded and financed with the goal of competing with Google, as well as Yahoo and Microsoft. (In June, Google accounted for 61.5 percent of search queries in the United States, while Yahoo held 20.9 percent and Microsoft had 9.2 percent, according to comScore.) Some of the most prominent include Powerset, which Microsoft recently bought, and Wikia, which was founded by Jimmy Wales, one of the creators of Wikipedia. So far, none have managed to make a dent in the search market.

Cuil发音“cool”，只是最近一大串刚起步公司中的一个，他们创建和得到投资的目标都是来强Google的饭碗，当然还有雅虎和微软（comScore提供的数据表明，六月份Google占领了61.5%的美国本土市场份额，雅虎和微软分别为20.9%和9.2%。）其中比较优秀的包括Powerset，刚刚被微软收购，和Wikia，这是由Jimmy Wales创建的，他也是维基百科的创始人之一。到现在为止还没有一个在搜索市场上有所表现。

But some analysts say Cuil has potential, in part because of the pedigree of its founders.

但是有些分析家认为Cuil很有潜力，部分归功于它的创建者的血统。

“This is the most promising thing I’ve seen in a while,” said Danny Sullivan, who has followed the online search business for more than a decade and is the editor of Search Engine Land. “Whether they are going to threaten Microsoft, much less Google, that’s another story.”

Mr. Costello, a former researcher at Stanford, said that with 120 billion Web pages, Cuil’s search index is larger than any other. The company uses a form of data mining to group Web pages by content, which makes the search engine more efficient, he said. Instead of showing results as short snippets of text and images with links, it displays longer entries and uses more pictures. It also provides tools to help users further refine their queries.

“这是我最近看到最有前途的一个，”Danny Sullivan说，他关注搜索引擎领域已经有十年之久，现在是 Search Engine Land的主编。“他们现在威胁到了微软，要对Google产生影响，那又是另一番说法了。”Costello先生，一位斯坦福的前研究员，谈到拥有1200亿的网页，Cuil的搜索检索无疑是最大的。他还提到公司使用一种数据挖掘技术来根据内容对网页进行归类，这样一来搜索引擎会更有效率。它显示的也不是内容的简单摘要和带有链接的图片，而是大段的介绍，更多的图片。它还提供了帮助用户进一步优化他们查询的工具。

Google would not comment on Cuil and would not disclose the size of its own index. But in an e-mail statement, Google said that it maintained “the largest collection of documents searchable on the Web” and welcomed competition.

Google对Cuil不做任何评论对自己的索引的大小也只字不提。但是在一份邮件声明中Google说他们拥有“最大的可搜索的文件集”并且欢迎竞争。

Mr. Sullivan said he was unimpressed by Cuil’s claim that its index includes more Web pages, noting that that could mean users are “overwhelmed by a whole bunch of junk.” But he said that Cuil’s new approach to ranking pages and presenting results could prove to be a hit with some users.

Sullivan说他对Cuil的索引包含更多的网页说法不感冒，并指出这可能意味着用户会被一堆垃圾搞晕掉。但是他也承认Cuil新的对网页的排名方法和显示结果的方式会为一些用户所追捧。

“If it turns out that they have good relevancy, I could see that the word of mouth” would bring Cuil some popularity, he said.

“如果他们的相关性非常好我们会口口相传就会把Cuil捧红，”他说。

Ms. Patterson left Google in 2006 to found Cuil. The new company has other prominent ex-Google employees, including Russell Power, who worked with Ms. Patterson on the large Google index, and Louis Monier, a former chief technology officer at AltaVista, a pioneering search engine. Cuil, which has about 30 employees and is in Menlo Park, Calif., has raised $33 million from venture investors.

Patterson女士于2006年离开Google并创建Cuil。新的公司还有一些别的曾经在Google工作过的牛人，包括Russell Power，他曾和Patterson女士一起在Google庞大的索引系统工作，还有Louis Monier，AltaVista（搜索领域的开拓者）的前任首席技术员。Cuil现在拥有30名员工，总部设在加州的门洛园，已经从丰县投资人那里拿到3300万美金的投资。