It’s Cuil vs Google. For the uninitiated, Cuil (pronounced as cool) is the latest search engine to hit the Web. In a world that runs on Google, Cuil did manage to create some pre-launch stir. The expectations were quite high. It’s not as if others have not tried to challenge Google’s monopoly. Teoma, Vivisimo, Snap, Mahalo and, most recently Powerset have been there and done that. But this time the challenge was different. The challengers were a bunch from the Google pack itself.

Cuil founder president Anna Patterson joined Google in 2004 after designing, writing and selling Recall—then the largest search engine with 12 billion pages. Vice-presidents Russell Power and Louis Monier, too, have done time at Google. But have they been able to recreate the magic of Googleplex. The Indian Express checks it out:

The homepage has a slick and appealing blue-black-gray look. It’s a welcome change from the white background of most other search engines. The interface is uncluttered yet inviting. Cuil claims to be the “the world’s biggest search engine, searching three times as many pages as Google and ten times that of Microsoft”. It claims to search about 120 billion web pages. But Google says its index is bigger, though it’s yet to reveal the numbers.

The results show up in an innovative column format. But it does take a while to get used to this if you are accustomed to the regular formats. However, it displays relatively long entries along with thumbnail pictures. There is also a sidebar that gives further options on your query.

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