Cuil to Rival Google

Cuil, the search engine hoping to knock Google off the top spot, has been launched. Associated with the name of the mythical Irish hero Fin McCuil and pronounced like "cool", as the Cuil FAQs point out, the name is Gaelic for both knowledge and hazel. The search engine was founded by Tom Costello, a former employee at IBM, and his wife Anna Patterson, who worked for Google for three years. They believe that the current search engines have not kept up with the exponential growth of the Internet. They claim Cuil covers more web sites than any other search engine – three times more than Google and 10 times more than Microsoft.

Google no longer reveals the size of its search index, merely saying in its corporate blog on Friday that it is "proud to have the most comprehensive index of any search engine," and that their systems show the Web as now exceeding one trillion independent URLs. Estimates put the Google index at around 30 to 50 billion web sites. In comparison, Cuil, which specialises in English, claims it has already indexed 120 billion.

Data protectionists will probably be more interested in another difference between Cuil and Google. Whereas the latter saves user data, the former does not. Cuil says it wants to analyse the web, not users. The operator's privacy guidelines are accordingly short, and they contain a passage about cookies, explaining that they are only used to save a particular user's preferences and are not stored on Cuil servers.

Cuil does not display search hits as a list of links and short key words, but rather in columns with a brief text and an image. The operators called this new way of presenting hits "organised results" and claim that the hits are more easily readable this way. In addition, a box of categories is displayed for surfers to fine-tune the hits displayed. Search results are not sorted by popularity, but rather by content. At the moment Cuil's search results preview is a bit indiscriminate as it tends to associate the wrong thumbnail images with sampled search text. For example a search for "John Hammond" shows pictures of John Hammond jnr., the famous blues singer, associated with search text for Sir John Hammond FRS and John Hammond the BBC weather forecaster.

Madrone Capital, Greylock and Tugboat Ventures have already invested $33m in the project. Madrone alone has put in $25m. In addition to Patterson, CFO and co-founder Russell Power and product manager Louis Monier are former staff members at Google. Monier also used to work at AltaVista, where he got the automated machine translator Babel Fish going. He later went to eBay to oversee a redesign.