A group of former Google engineers on Monday launched a rival Internet search engine, Cuil, saying it is an improved version of the world’s most popular Web-scouring tool.
Cuil’s founders are taking unabashed aim at their one-time workplace, claiming they out search Google when it comes to depth and breadth on the rapidly expanding Internet.
"The Internet is getting bigger and more disorganized every day," Cuil’s founders said in a posting on the website that went live Monday at www.cuil.com.
"We’ve developed new architecture and algorithms that can handle the exponential growth of the Internet and organize results that reflect its enormous complexity."
Cuil says that unlike Google, which reportedly ignores seldom visited or obscure websites in its index, Cuil doesn’t discriminate and has packed 120 billion Internet pages in its index.
"Size matters because many people use the Internet to find information that is of interest to them, even if it’s not popular," Cuil said.
"Maybe no one phones your grandmother much, but if her friend from the old neighborhood wants to get in touch, shouldn’t her number be in the book? Cuil lists all the numbers, even the ones that aren’t called much. Because one day someone will need that number."
Cuil’s founders include former "Googlers" Anna Patterson, Russell Power and Louis Monier. Patterson and Power worked on Google’s "TeraGoogle" search index and Monier specialized in search engine design.
In a seemingly pre-emptive blog posting on Friday, Google software engineers Jesse Alpert and Nissan Hajaj said the company scans more than a trillion web pages and indexes those it believes will be useful to searchers.
"We’re proud to have the most comprehensive index of any search engine, and our goal always has been to index all the world’s data," Alpert and Hajaj said in the posting.
Google dominates online search with more than 60 percent of the market and is so popular the company’s name has become a verb. Analysts believe Google has become so entrenched in culture it will be hard to unseat.
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