There's yet another new search engine on the block, but this time, it's being ballyhooed as an actual challenger to Google. Cuil.com (pronounced "cool") made its public launch today and already calls itself the "biggest search engine on the web." Run by a team of former Google employees, the startup takes a slightly different approach to search than most of the big names, but whether it will be able to unseat Google—or even Yahoo—remains to be seen.

Right off the bat, the Cuil team makes a number of direct comparisons to Google, but often without actually naming the Big G. For one, Cuil brags that it has already indexed 120 billion Web pages, roughly three times as many as Google and ten times as many as Microsoft. "Rather than rely on superficial popularity metrics" like Google does, Cuil's info page says that the site contextually analyzes each page and organizes search results based on content and relevance.

When you search for a particular keyword, Cuil attempts to group the results into relevant categories. As you can see from my screenshot below, searching for "chinchilla" produces tabs for "all results," "chinchilla food," "chinchilla supplies," and "chinchilla fur" across the top. An "Explore by Category" box on the right-hand side of the results page offers a number of further associations (in this case, related to the Australian town of Chinchilla in Queensland).

This is, of course, assuming you get any search results at all. Among Cuil's 120 billion web pages, we weren't able to get results for the large majority of our searches; the search only worked with mostly generic terms. Even searching for a very specific name ("Ars Technica"), which should point to our URL, yielded nothing for several hours, although it did manage to spit out some search results at publication time.

When we were able to get results, they were oddly grouped in ways that didn't make a lot of sense to us. Clearly, Cuil has a ways to go in optimizing its search pattern analysis to figure out exactly what it is that users are looking for and how to present it, although some of these burps can undoubtedly be attributed to opening day troubles.

Who needs search logs?



Cuil also makes a pot shot at Google and other search engines when it comes to privacy issues. "We believe that analyzing the Web rather than our users is a more useful approach, so we don't collect data about you and your habits, lest we are tempted to peek. With Cuil, your search history is always private," says the company.

Indeed, Google has been in the spotlight lately due to the extensive user search logs it keeps, which are now being anonymized within 18 to 24 months thanks to pressure from privacy advocates. The issue came up again recently when a judge ordered Google to turn over 12TB of YouTube search data to Viacom (the two companies have since agreed that Google will anonymize the database before handing it over).

Even though Google has managed to stay mostly out of trouble so far by anonymizing its data, Cuil hopes to circumvent the entire privacy mess by not keeping logs at all. With no search data in the first place, there's nothing for privacy advocates to get worried about.

"The Web continues to grow at a fantastic rate and other search engines are unable to keep up with it," Cuil CEO and cofounder Tom Costello said in a statement. "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."

Though we agree that Cuil offers a unique perspective on search, it looks to be a long while before it can challenge the top players. Human-powered search engine Mahalo launched just over a year ago and has certainly gained popularity since then, but it has yet to do anything to unseat Google or Yahoo. We'll continue to keep our eye on Cuil, but we still doubt that we'll be seeing the next "Google Killer" anytime soon.