Within hours of being launched Monday, Cuil - a new search engine created by former top Google engineers - was already being touted in the blogosphere as the next Google killer. But unless Cuil (pronounced ‘cool’) can develop an ad platform to rival Google’s, the startup will have a difficult time challenging the search giant.

The comparisons to Google (GOOG) were inevitable. Cuil was founded by several lead engineers from Google, including Anna Patterson, chief architect of the company’s TeraGoogle search index. Cuil also claims its search algorithm scans 120 billion web pages - three times the number that Google sifts through. And Cuil’s spare start page is reminiscent of Google’s minimalist home page.

The launch of Cuil certainly raised eyebrows at Google. Though the company would not comment on Cuil, Google’s web search team stuck it to the small search startup on Monday with a blog post that begins, “We knew the web was big….We’ve known it for a long time.”

Cuil representatives did not return phone calls.

Full story: fortune.cnn.com 

Labels: Cuil, employees, IndexTools, search

Cuil , a new search engine developed by former Google employees, is taking the stage today. It's pronounced cool, but written Cuil, and annoyingly Web 2.0 looking, but it's also a new take on search. With about $33 million in venture funding, and a bunch of search brainiacs, can Cuil make it where so many have, sort of, just made it, in a so what sort of way? It may do if today's announcement doesn't crash the site.

Cuil's search index boast 120 billion Web pages, and Google recently claimed a trillion. Numbers that take into consideration the diversity and size of the Web, but also include the crappy one pagers that are put up by domain parkers and spammers. However, a quick play with Cuil, and you'll notice that it delivers search results in a column format that is more akin to a publication layout then, a typical search result listing.The Cuil folk claim to use datamining techniques to drill down deeper into the content of a page, and provide more visual keys to help rank the relevance of pages in a search result listing.

Read more: tgdaily.com 

Labels: Cuil, employees, IndexTools, search