Ex-Google staff launch rival search engine, Cuil

The new site promises better results by scouring a larger index of web pages than Google, but experts are cautious about its prospects
A group of former Google employees is hoping to outmanouvre their old boss by developing a rival search engine they claim provides a more comprehensive guide to the web.
Cuil, which went live today, was built by Anna Patterson, a former Google employee who helped create the company's index - the enormous catalogue of web pages which its scours every time someone conducts a query.
Speaking before the launch of Cuil, which is pronounced 'cool', Ms Patterson said that one of the main reasons rival search engines such as Microsoft Windows Live and Yahoo! had struggled was because they weren't able to index as many pages as Google.
Cuil had solved that problem by compiling an index three times as large as Google's - searching for results across 120 billion web pages compared with Google's index of 40 billion pages, she said. Google does not reveal how large its index is, but in a statement today said that it welcomed competition, which "stimulates innovation and provides users with more choice."
Rather than displaying results in a list, like Google, Cuil shows them on a page which has a more magazine-like feel. Each result has a greater amount of text alongside it, and sometimes an image as well. "You can't be an alternative search engine and smaller," Mr Patterson was quoted as saying. "You have to be alternative and bigger."
Cuil, which is based in Menlo Park, near San Francisco, has raised $33 million from venture capital investors.
s well as Ms Patterson, its founding team includes her husband, Tom Costello, who developed search technology for the computing giant IBM, and two other former Google engineers - Russell Power, who worked on the same team as Ms Patterson, and Louis Monier, who was also the chief technology officer at Alta Vista, one of the most popular pre-Google search engines.