Thursday 31st July 2008

Thursday, 31st July, 2008: Research by Irish company Statcounter, which provides free web site traffic statistics, shows that Cuil, the new search engine launched on Monday could be a significant rival to Google. After just one day, Cuil accounted for 1 in every 1000 searches done.

Aodhan Cullen, CEO and founder of StatCounter said, "This is phenomenal when you consider that Altavista, a search engine founded in 1995, accounted for just 6 in 10,000 searches."

Cullen continued, "There are over 100 search engines we monitor and Cuil was in the top ten in US, UK and Ireland. When you consider that over 90 other search engines (e.g. go, excite, alltheweb.com, lycos) combined accounted for just 1.54% of searches on Tuesday - Cuil with its 0.1% share on the market inside 24 hours is doing extremely well."

On Tuesday Cuil accounted for 1 in 1,000 searches globally and in the US. 1 in 500 searches in the UK and 1 in every 400 searches in Ireland.*

*Note: This information is based on a sample of over 25 million page views globally.

Ends

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Mary O'Brien/Jacinta Ryan (Simpson FTPR) Tel: +353-1-2605300/+353 86 8330809

About StatCounter

StatCounter, a free online visitor stats tool, was founded in 1999. It offers its members the chance to grow and improve their online businesses by allowing them to monitor the number of hits to their website; the geographical location of visitors; the various pages a visitor views; keywords used to find the site plus other features.

StatCounter currently has over 1.5 million members and tracks in excess of 9 billion pageloads per month over its network of 2 million websites. A Google PageRank 9/10 site, StatCounter was recently named by web information company Alexa as one of the most visited sites in the US. For information on this real-time, user-friendly, and free visitor stats tool, please visit www.statcounter.com