Twitter: We Can Do What Google Can't†

Venture Capital Backer Says Search Is Reason It Walked Away From Facebook Deal

Advertising Age, March 3, 2009 — Twitter sees lucrative opportunities in search, albeit a different kind of search than what Google offers, and, as co-founder Biz Stone told Ad Age recently, "we'll certainly be exploring those."

It's because of the potential it sees in search that the Twitter co-founders walked away from a $500 million offer from Facebook — not just the terms of the deal, said Todd Chaffee, an Institutional Venture Partners general partner and a new Twitter backer.

Former Employees of Google Prepare Rival Search Engine

New York Times, July 28, 2008 — 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.

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

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.