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Tech Bytes: Cuil.com is cool when it's working
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Published: July 31, 2008
Cuil.com, the latest rival to Google and Yahoo in the search-engine market, began operation Monday and quickly became a victim of its own success.
"We'll be back soon," an error message read on the site. "Due to overwhelming interest, our Cuil servers are running a bit hot right now. The search engine is momentarily unavailable as we add more capacity. Thanks for your patience."
Some prospective users would begin a search only to get: "Due to excessive load, our servers didn't return results. Please try your search again."
If those initial glitches get taken care of, Cuil.com is a promising service.
It searches more than 121 billion Web pages. The company was formed by several former Google employees.
"The search engine goes beyond today's search techniques of link analysis and traffic ranking to analyze the context of each page and the concepts behind each query," according to a press release from Cuil. "It then organizes similar search results into groups and sorts them by category."
According to numbers from comScore Inc., Google has 62 percent of the U.S. search-engine market, followed by Yahoo with 21 percent.
The Cuil in the name is pronounced "Cool," and derives from an old Irish word for knowledge. Tom Costello, a co-founder and the CEO of the company, is from Dorgheda, Ireland.
Mobile digital television got a test run last week in the Raleigh-Durham area, when two channels of specially encoded video were broadcast over CBS affiliate WRAL's digital signal and received on prototype handheld receivers.
WRAL teamed up with the CBS New Media Group for a field test of the MPH (Mobile Pedestrian Handheld) system, a technology that will one day allow people to watch live video on the move using their cell phones, laptop computers and portable media players.
Current technology won't let people catch video on the move. According to WRAL, "Part of the ‘secret sauce' behind MPH is its capability to broadcast data in four streams. The tuner chips in the mobile devices will include error correction of the TV station's signal, thus enabling mobile access."
The devices could catch video broadcasts while users are going more than 100 miles an hour.
Devices that use the technology are in development by companies such as Samsung and LG Electronics, and are expected to be available in stores next year.
For more information, check out the Open Mobile Video Coalition's Web site at www.openmobilevideo.com.
■ Tim Clodfelter can be reached at 727-7371 or at tclodfelter@wsjournal.com.
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