WebProNews

New search engine in the works

Cuill is cool, and pronounced that way. The in-stealth mode company full of assorted search experts, ex-Google and others, gained $25 million worth of confidence from their venture capital backers.

Cuill indulged in a little buzz-building this afternoon. The startup touted a $25 million cash infusion, courtesy of a Series B round of investment led by Madrone Capital Partners.

"Our goal is to offer a dramatically improved search experience and we look forward to sharing Cuill with everyone on the Web," Anna Patterson, president and co-founder of Cuill, said in a statement. Patterson picked up a mention in Fortune in January regarding her new role at Cuill, followed by her stint at Google.

Fortune also suggested that Google would buy up Cuill from Patterson and husband/Cuill CEO Tom Costello, before they open up to the masses. Granted, rumors from the Bay Area permeate Silicon Valley like a tanker spill of patchouli oil would, so keep that in mind.

Cuill noted their crawler, with the user-agent name of Twiceler (a play on Dr. Seuss' Once-ler, perhaps?), has been making the rounds of the Internet from a variety of IP addresses. The corporate skillsets include work on Google large search index, TeraGoogle, as well as clustering and page analysis.

How that might add up to a different search experience is anyone's guess. At least they aren't beating the drum about natural language search, a concept that gets bounced around a lot but really hasn't yielded a world-changing product.