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With a gargantuan expansion in the Internet over the last decade or so the need to fire up searches at a lightening pace, yielding the best results has soared up. Unfortunately the growth in search engines has not been proportional compared to that of the Internet. Google has been dominant in this department with claim of having indexed around 1 trillion pages. There is definitely enough room for another and this is where Cuil comes in with an index of 120 billion pages as reported by Michael Arrington.

Based in Menlo Park, the search engine that has been tipped in as the most comprehensive search engine is the brainchild of Tom Costello, his wife Anna Patterson and aided by Russell Power (both Patterson and Russell are ex-Google employees). The current indexing makes it the largest search engine, almost three times as big as any other search engine presently.

Pronounced as ‘Cool’; is an old Irish word for Knowledge, providing users with organized and relevant results based on analysis of content that has been searched for. The working technique is a bit different as it doesn’t rely on page ranking etc, rather goes a step further in analysing the content of each page before it finally gives out an organized and similar search results, sorted into categories.

CEO and co-founder of Cuil, Tom Costello added:

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. In addition, Cuil presents searchers with content-based results, not just popular ones, providing different and more insightful answers that illustrate the vastness and the variety of the Web.

There are plenty of features that make it stand out; giving users a more defined look into their search results. The features present are briefly highlighted:

Drilldown and Roll-over: This panel on the right helps you to ‘explore your search results by category’. This shows the list of subjects in relation to your search. When you trace your pointer over a category, you are shown a definition for that option, enabling you to get an idea of what it might be before you proceed to the directed page.

Tabs: As they are always helpful, Cuil offers other way round for searched with these. Now what difference does it make? Well I remember how hectic it is when I want to find out where I can get my auto parts from and my search results from various search engines make sure I scroll my life out. With Cuil, users can directly jump to their desired results. From parts, to sale and even browse through all results, isn’t that a bit easier for the dear searchers?

Navigation Suggestion: Cuil helps you with suggestions as you type in a query along with an icon (if the related query has one). This might sound similar to auto-complete that we have on browsers, but it isn’t as these suggestions are automatically generated by Cuil itself. Anna Patterson, COO and co-founder Cuil added:

Our team approaches search differently. By leveraging our expertise in search architecture and relevance methods, we’ve built a more efficient yet richer search engine from the ground up. The Internet has grown and we think it’s time search did too.

Cuil is on with a bit of experimentation with it’s two and three column search result display, along with an image and summary of the results; which is much more than that displayed by other engines.

Could this come off as a red light to other search engines? No matter how good features Cuil introduces, it’s still pretty early to call it a direct challenger of Google, but for the dwarfs in the race, I bet they are in to face a pretty strong challenge with Cuil.

(pictures and information courtesy Cuil)