Anna Patterson, a former Google employee, and her husband have started a new search engine called Cuil. They plan to top Google by indexing more Web pages.

Cuil is pronounced as “cool” and the company is based in Menlo Park, California. It's led by Anna Patterson, a former leader in Google’s search index business, and her husband, Tom Costello. Costello has researched and developed search engines at Stanford University and IBM.

With so much experience behind them, the two have started Cuil and they plan to unseat Google as the top search leader. So far, they have indexed 120 billion Web pages. In order to surpass Google they have to index more than 1 trillion Web pages and counting.

Another former Google employee is also assisting the husband and wife team; Russell Power, the third co-founder of the group, worked at Google on search indexing, Web rankings and spam detection.

The main points for Cuil are:

1. It has a good interface with results neatly arranged, but it needs to give the top results first if the interface is to look meaningful.

2. It offers privacy to users; Cuil won’t save or log data for future use.

3. It has a good suggestion feature; before you type a word, it offers various options for the word, saving time for users.

4. It has no advertising but the company may add some later.

A search for the movie "Dark Knight" gives the following results:

TechCrunch's Michael Arrington compared Cuil with Google and stated that it has a long way to go but it's a good start.

Cuil’s ranking isn’t as good as Google’s based on the pure results returned from both queries. Where Cuil excels is with the related categories, which return results that are extremely relevant…And I want to reemphasize that Cuil is only an hour old at this point, Google has had a decade to perfect their search engine.

I tested Cuil briefly and it appears to work well. But with Google, I am used to getting the best result at the top and Google has so many other search options such as images, maps, videos, Wikipedia, IMDB, products, documents, news, blogs etc. -- it will take some time before people switch over to another engine, I would guess.

In my opinion, Cuil will most likely end up in the hands of either Microsoft or Yahoo, as I doubt Cuil can manage on their own in the long run.

Cuil means knowledge in Irish language.