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Ex-Google worker Anna Patterson has already sold away one of her innovative search techniques to Google before, but doesn’t plan on selling her latest idea to Google anytime soon. In fact, instead of helping Google, she aims to single-handedly take down the search giant. Her new search engine, Cuil, aims to be better than Google had ever been. Initially kept on a low profile, Cuil (pronounced “Cool") was designed by three Google engineers and boasts the fact that it indexes about 3 times more pages than even Google does (around 120 billion pages). Whether this will convince Google users to make the transfer is another story completely, but they can definitely try.

The block result layout places results in a tiled manner around the web page instead of Google’s more generic ranked list style. However, both the page and its search results seem to take quite a while to load and the website has cut in and out of use the entire day. It’s definitely off to a rough start, but Patterson’s claim of its wider scope seems promising. The search results now, though, are lacking in many areas. They seem to either be repeat results, irrelevant material, or ad placement sites. Maybe the increased scope of sites may contain a greater number of useless web information. Either way, it seems that it has little chance of making that much of a difference in the web search sector. After all, Microsoft and Yahoo are spending millions of dollars on their search engines and Google still seems to be gaining more ground. Let’s hope that they give up soon and offer their techniques to the search giants again, because, quite frankly, most people “doubt [Cuil] will be keeping anyone at Google awake at night.”

Read [CNN]

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