There is someone new in the search engine shark pool: cuil.com.

They do not start silently, they know who is the enemy and the attack is declared:

cuil.com [Cuil means knowledge in Irish] claims to search 121,617,892,992 web pages, which is “three times as many as Google and ten times as many as Microsoft”.

About their search method cuil.com unveils the following concept, which is not really that innovative as it sounds:

Rather than rely on superficial popularity metrics, Cuil searches for and ranks pages based on their content and relevance. When we find a page with your keywords, we stay on that page and analyze the rest of its content, its concepts, their inter-relationships and the page’s coherency.

According personal data protection, cuil wants to inncocent and says not to intend to collect data from it’s users. A noble plan. indeed, but google wanted to do no evil, too and now is bowing to China’s censorship restrictions. We’ll see…

Cuil.com is offering several new features, like quick link icon in the search term suggestions, roll over descriptions, suggestions to clarify your search that come in tabs and categorized terms related to your search.

The staff from cuil might still hold some aces in behind, with some of them haveing worked at google themselves.
All in all cuil.com comes lean, fast and a nice look featuring some good and promising ideas.
On the other hand lacking some evident features like a country/language restricted search.
Let’s see how they get started and manage to conquer the hearts and the approvement of the internet usership.

Good luck cuil.com!