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Anna Patterson’s last Internet search engine was so impressive that industry leader Google Inc. bought the technology in 2004 to upgrade its own system.

She believes her latest invention is even more valuable — only this but it’s not for sale.

Patterson instead intends to upstage Google, which she quit in 2006 to make grow a more comprehensive and proficient concede to scour the Internet.

The end result is Cuil, pronounced "cool." Backed by $33 million in venture capital, the search engine plans to begin processing requests for the first time Monday.

Cuil had kept a murmurous profile while Patterson, her husband, Tom Costello, and two other former Google engineers — Russell Power and Louis Monier — searched for better ways to search. Now, it’s boasting continually. What do you think of the new Cuil search engine?

For starters, Cuil’s search index spans 120 billion Web pages.

Patterson believes that’s at least three times the size of Google’s index, although there is no way to know for established. Google stopped publicly quantifying its index’s breadth not quite three years ago when the catalog spanned 8.2 billion Web pages.

Cuil won’t divulge the formula it has developed to cover a wider swath of the Web with far fewer computers than Google. And Google isn’t ceding the point: Spokeswoman Katie Watson said her company still believes its index is the largest.

After getting inquiries about Cuil, Google asserted on its blog Friday that it regularly scans through 1 trillion unique Web links. But Google said it doesn’t index them all because they either point to alike resemble volume or would diminish the quality of its search results in some other way. The posting didn’t quantify the size of Google’s index.

A search index’s scope is important because information, pictures and content can’t be originate unless they’re stored in a database. But Cuil believes it wish outshine Google in various other ways, including its method for identifying and displaying pertinent results.

Rather than trying to mimic Google’s method of ranking the quantity and eminence of links to Web sites, Patterson says Cuil’s technology drills into the actual content of a call. And Cuil’s results will be presented in a more magazine-like format instead of just a vertical stack of Web links. Cuil’s results are displayed with more photos spread horizontally across the page and include sidebars that can be clicked on to learn more about topics related to the original search request.

Finally, Cuil is hoping to captivate traffic by promising not to retain information about its users’ search histories or surfing patterns — something that Google does, much to the consternation of privacy watchdogs.

Cuil is just the latest in a long line of Google challengers.

The list includes swaggering startups like Teoma (whose technology became the backbone of Ask.com), Vivisimo, Snap, Mahalo and, most recently, Powerset, which was acquired by Microsoft Corp. this month.

Even after investing hundreds of millions of dollars on search, both Microsoft and Yahoo Inc. have been losing tutor to Google. Through May, Google held a 62 percent share of the U.S. search market followed by Yahoo at 21 percent and Microsoft at 8.5 percent, according to comScore Inc.

Google has become so synonymous with Internet search that it may no longer implication how good Cuil or any other challenger is, said Gartner Inc. analyst Allen Weiner.

"Search has become as much about branding as anything else," Weiner said. "I doubt (Cuil) will be keeping anyone at Google wake up to at night."

Google welcomed Cuil to the fray with its usual mantra in the matter of its rivals. "Having able competitors is a huge benefit to us and everyone in the search space," Watson said. "It makes us all work harder, and at the end of the day our users benefit from that."

But this will be the first time that Google has battled a general-purpose search engine created by its own alumni. It probably won’t be the mould time, given that Google at the moment has nearly 20,000 employees.

Patterson joined Google in 2004 after she built and sold Recall, a search index that probed old Web sites for the Internet Archive. She and Power worked on the same team at Google.

Although he also worked for Google for a short time, Monier is best known as the former chief technology copper of AltaVista, which was considered the best search engine before Google came along in 1998. Monier also helped build the search engine on eBay’s online auction area.

The trio of former Googlers are teaming up with Patterson’s manage, Costello, who built a once-promising search engine called Xift in the delayed 1990s. He later joined IBM Corp., where he worked on an "analytic engine" called WebFountain.

Costello’s Irish legacy inspired Cuil’s odd name. It was derived from a character named Finn McCuill in Celtic folklore.

Patterson enjoyed her time at Google, but became disenchanted with the company’s approach to search. "Google has looked pretty much the same championing 10 years now," she said, "and I can guarantee it will look the same a year from now."
From: rss.cnn.com

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