Cyberspace has been buzzing with the news of a new search engine, and this ''cool'' new entrant in the Web search stakes proposes to take on the biggest of them all – the ubiquitous Google.

Cuil, pronounced  ''cool'', was launched with much fanfare last Monday, and declared itself as covering three times as much ground as its larger rival by indexing 122 billion pages on the World Wide Web. However, such claims need to be carefully examined before being accepted, considering two of Google's engineers had recently announced that the Google index count had hit one trillion, though not all linked to unique URLs. (See: Google Web index hits one trillion mark)

The driving force behind Cuil is its president Anna Patterson, who is noted for having created the world's biggest search engine index consisting of 30 billion pages using information from the internet archive at Archive.org.

After this phenomenal achievement, Google employed her and the index she created became the starting point for the company's TeraGoogle index.

She is joined by her husband Tom Costello, an Irish academic and businessman. Costello, who had built a prototype of Web Fountain, IBM's Web search analytics tool, is CEO of Cuil. It is his Irish ancestry that sparked the name Cuil, which is taken from a Celtic folklore character called Finn McCuill. The company says its name is Irish (Gaelic) for knowledge and hazel.

The two are joined by two former Google colleagues, Russell Power and Louis Monier. Previously, Monier led the redesign of ecommerce leader eBay's search engine and was the founding chief technology officer of two 1990s Web milestones, AltaVista and BabelFish, the first language translation site.

"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," said Costello.

Founded in late 2006, the Menlo Park, California-based Cuil has raised $33 million in two separate rounds: The first, for $8 million from Greylock and Tugboat Ventures, and the second for $25 million by Madrone Capital Partners.

Initially, Cuil is optimized for American English. Later this year, the company plans to enable Cuil users to perform searches in major European languages, Patterson said. Eventually, Cuil plans to make money by running ads alongside search results, she said, but provided no further details.

Of course, the million-dollar question is, ''how cool is Cuil''? Well, in spite of the widely publicised launch, it still has some way to go before it catches up with Google. Although Cuil displays search results in a visually appealing magasine format with thumbnails, it takes longer to load and may be difficult to navigate. The all-black homepage can elicit strong reactions, both positive and negative. While some may think of it as cool and futuristic, others may find the white Google interface more soothing to the eyes.

However, the main aspect in which Cuil currently lags behind Google is the relevance of results. Consider, searching for the term ''india'' and it is clear that Google throws up more relevant answers.

One small detail that the Cuil founders may want to consider is the similarity of its name to the homepage of a hard-core Italian porn site: culi.com. A small typographical error can be quite embarrassing especially as it bombards the screen with a plethora of multiple porn pop-up windows that may be hard to explain if some one else happens to be around.

However, one aspect in which Cuil clearly scores over its rival is privacy. Because the service focuses on the content of the pages rather than click history, the company has no need to store users' personal information or their search histories, it says.

"We are all about pattern analysis," Patterson says. "We go over the corpus (Web pages) 12 times before we even index it."

Its privacy policy clearly states – ''when you search with Cuil, we do not collect any personally identifiable information, period. We have no idea who sends queries: not by name, not by IP address, and not by cookies…your search history is your business, not ours.''

In contrast, Google's privacy policy states – ''Google maintains and processes personal information in order to provide your personalised homepage and other services. This information will be stored in a cookie on your machine and sent to Google when you request the page if you have set up a page without an associated Google Account, or transmitted to Google's servers and securely stored in association with your Google Account information if you are signed in to your Google Account.''

At a time when Internet snooping and Big Brother-like supervision is becoming closer to reality, Cuil's hands-off policy will definitely find many takers.