When Alta Vista launched, it indexed about 50 percent of the Web. Years later, Google launched at the same capacity. But the opportunity today in search engine technology, says Cuil co-founder Anna Patterson, is that the outlay for the hardware required to search the ever-growing pool of content has become prohibitively expensive. In this clip, Patterson describes Cuil’s alternative, mathematical algorithm to “scatter gather” search that is both more thorough and more efficient, allowing just 140 machines to log 124 billion pages.