'Cuil' new search engine launched

A new search engine that claims to offer complete user privacy has been launched.

Called Cuil and pronounced 'cool', the name comes from the Irish word for knowledge.

The company says that it has no need to collect data from searchers as it ranks pages based on their content rather than the number of clicks, meaning that search data is completely private.

Cuil also claims to analyse the context of each page in its index and the concepts behind each query, making it closer to a 'semantic' search engine than competitors such as Google.

"The web continues to grow at a fantastic rate and other search engines are unable to keep up with it," said Tom Costello, chief executive and co-founder of Cuil.

"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," Costello continued.

The company claims to have indexed 120 billion web pages, which it says is three times more than any other search engine.

However, recent claims from Google that there are more than one trillion unique URLs on the web would seem to contradict this.

What do you think of the Cuil search engine? Have your say in the Web User forums.

www.cuil.com