Is Cuil’s Category based reporting ‘cool’ enough to challenge the giant?

A former google employee and her husband have launched a new search engine called Cuil, aiming to topple Google by indexing more web pages than the giant.

The new search engine is only available for USA and currently not here in the UK but it should be rolling out a world wide version that will detect IP address before presnting results accordingly.

California-based Cuil (pronounced Cool) is lead by Anna Patterson, a former leader of Google’s search index and her husband, Tom Costello, a Trinity College Dublin graduate who developed search engines at Stanford University and IBM. The two, president and CEO respectively, are joined by Russell Power, vice president of engineering, who also worked at Google on search indexing, web rankings and spam detection.

The company said it has indexed 120 billion web pages and can provide results organised by ideas with complete privacy for users. Google said it had discovered one trillion unique web pages on the internet, but did not give an updated number of how many it has indexed.

Cuil said its search engine goes beyond traditional approaches by analysing the context of each page and the concepts behind each query so it can provide better rankings by content rather than popularity. Cuil then organises similar results into groups and sorts them by category.

“The web continues to grow at a fantastic rate and other search engines are unable to keep up with it.” said Costello.

“Our significant breakthroughs in search technology have enabled us to index much more of the internet, placing nearly the entire web at the fingertips of every user. In addition, Cuil presents searchers with content based results, not just popular ones, providing different and more insightful answers that illustrate the vastness and the variety of the web.”

Cuil isn’t the first Google rival to launch this year. Wikia search, from Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales, debuted in January. Wikia search hopes to provide better search results by allowing a community of users to index pages by using their web page rankings.

Danny Sullivan, an expert on search engine technologies, said that Cuil will “provide the best test case since google itself overtook more established engines”.

In his Search Engine Land blog, Sullivan wrote that “Cuil provides what appears to be a comprehensive index of the web, a unique display presentation and emerges at a time when people might be ready to embrace a quality ‘underdog’. The big questions now are, how’s the relevancy hold up? And can word of mouth really still build significant Share?”