Declan O'Kelly speaks to Cuil Co-founder Tom Costello about building a search engine that will endure.

Tom Costello speaks quickly. He is a busy man.

Not only is he the co-founder of Cuil.com, a new search engine website, but he is also married to the other co-founder, Anna Patterson, and they have four children under the age of eight. As if he didn't have enough reasons not to be getting enough sleep, the market leader and Cuil's chief rival is none other than Google.

Cuil means Knowledge in Gaelic, and the company is named after the legend of Finn McCuil. The young warrior was cooking the salmon of knowledge for his master, Finnegas, who had spent his life trying to capture the salmon, when he inadvertently inherited all its wisdom when he sucked his thumb after scalding it while cooking the fish.

The name is a nod to Costello's Irish roots and an effort to create a global brand name.

"One of the things that is important in the IT space is that you try to be a world company," Costello told Irish America over the phone from the company's headquarters in Menlo Park, California. "It is very easy in the Silicon Valley to just focus on the West Coast or America. I wanted to have a general feeling of being more worldly, and I felt that drawing on the Irish heritage was a nice way of doing that."

In an interesting aside, Costello revealed that though feedback from Ireland has been overwhelmingly positive, one Irish-language newspaper received a letter arguing the company had misspelled the word Cuil. Costello's mother felt compelled to reply.

"My mother is a bit of a Gaelgoir, and needless to say she had to write in and correct them because in her opinion - and the great thing in Ireland is that everyone has an opinion - that is the right way to spell it, and the spelling in Ulster Irish is just as good as the spelling in Munster Irish. Neither is right, but both are permissible."

In a way, just like neither Ulster Irish nor Munster Irish is "right," no one search engine is "perfect," and if a new site offers users something unique and equally as beneficial, then it should find a place in the market. That was the seed that set Costello and Patterson on their grail to give the search industry a new alternative.

Finn McCuil got burnt before he absorbed all that wisdom from the salmon of knowledge. No pain no gain. At the launch of the site on July 28, there was so much traffic that several computer servers crashed; critics unsheathed their knives in some reviews of the new search engine, and Louis Monier, VP of Product Development, retired from his full time position at Cuil in September.

So has it been a difficult time? Costello sees it from a different perspective.

"We had a fabulous launch. Had we launched in September in the midst of this financial crisis, no one would ever have heard of us," he says. In this age then, even when all press is purportedly good press, was some of the naysaying a little hard to stomach?

"It's something that you expect. Especially from my Irish heritage, if you ever do well or pop up with a lot of attention, there will always be people there to knock you down," says Costello.

"For us, it was a fabulous start because we got people to hear about us. We are a little older than most startups, a lot of people here are in their 30s, 40s and 50s. People at that age are more intent at building something long term as opposed to immediate success. We are here to try and create. Some of the reasons that people left Google, for example, to do a startup were not for sudden success, but for the opportunity to build a long-term thing. We see it as a journey and we are very excited to be here to create over the next five, ten, fifteen years."

Costello, who was born and raised in Drogheda, County Louth, met Patterson, whose mother's family, the Ross's, come from Donegal and father's from Northern Ireland, while both were students at Stanford University. The two had offices next to one another but due to Tom being a late riser and Anna an early one, it was six months before they actually met.

A romance blossomed and the two were married in 1998. Their children Sean (8), Caia (7), Avania (5) and Ilaria (2) were all baptized in Drogheda.

After Stanford, Tom would end up working at IBM and Anna at Google. Costello maintains that the Cuil launch was akin to the opening of a restaurant - they had a huge amount of customers while they were ironing out the kinks.

"We are working hard at improving things every day," Tom says.

"We are rolling out new features every week. But we recognize that search isn't a business where you get overnight success. It took Google five or six years to take off from a small research project to be the thing that people use all the time. In the same way, we believe that when you build something you have to prove stuff to people. We believe that we have to find stuff for people, not once, but several times, before they say, 'these people are doing a good job and I will trust them to be the search engine I use all the time.' We are focused that when people don't find what they are looking for on other search engines and come to us, that we will come through for them."

Cuil maintains that it indexes 1.2 billion pages. They don't list the most popular pages, or the obvious choice of page, but rather analyze what pages will supply the best content for the search in question.

Visually, Cuil differentiates itself by listing results in a "magazine style" format using thumbnail-size photos.

One area where Cuil has an advantage is their privacy policy. They retain none of their users' private information. First of all, because they don't want to analyze user trends to provide the most popular search results, and secondly because of how life is evolving in the information age.

"People have a real feeling that companies shouldn't know an awful lot about you because there is a big danger in people knowing too much personal information," argues Costello.

"It is not a danger right now, but going forward as the world becomes more networked and people rely more on online services, it becomes even riskier that there would be all that information out there about you, essentially beyond your control. For that reason, privacy, especially in Europe, is a big issue for people and it is a demand that people have."

Cuil is slowly finding an audience among search users, and some of the trends in traffic have surprised Costello somewhat.

"One thing we have noticed, just from the pattern of traffic, is that we get an awful lot of European users - or else a lot of Americans who are up in the middle of the night. We get a lot more traffic on the weekends, so it seems that we are being used less by people at work and more by people in their free time, which is the opposite of most search engines."

But is it harder for the likes of Cuil to attract advertisers in a market dominated by one major player and is there a "fear factor" among other software firms who may consider forming partnerships with an untested and untried startup such as Cuil?

"I think it is the absolute opposite. Google is the 800-pound gorilla, and some people may think that Google is a little too big and a little too strong," Costello maintains. "There is a huge risk that we could end up with one search engine and that all the other search engines will drift away into irrelevance, and that would be terrible; terrible for the market leader and terrible for the consumers because they do not get the choice."

Costello and Patterson are also lucky that they have investors who are prepared to stick by them long-term and support them while they set out to establish themselves as a true alternative. With that said, would the startup ever consider merging if a big company came knocking on the door?

"I've worked with a big company, I've worked at IBM and it is almost impossible to be innovative and to make changes and to launch new features. That is the joy of being in a company you control. Being in a small company is the ability to be able to create and to do things. Most of the big players out there are just too big to be creative."

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