A new search engine was presented by former star Google engineers on Sunday. Cuil (pronounced "cool") is offering a new search service at www.cuil.com.

The project was founded by Tom Costello and Anna Patterson joined by Russell Power, the latter two being also ex-Google employees.

"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," Tom Costello, Cuil co-founder and chief executive, said in a statement.

And indeed it is said to index a larger portion of the Web than Google in a faster and cheaper way. It also features a stronger privacy policy based on not storing user data that could be used illegally later on.

But still creating a big index isn’t enough. It has to bring back the best results as well. Here Cuil is said to fail. It does not simply catalog keywords on a site and then rank it on its importance. It also has a semantic approach to the search. It works in order to see how words are related (Germay – beer – eagle, for example).

However it is a bit different from Powerset, a search engine that focuses on natural language processing as well but it does this by using artificial intelligence. Powerset released a limited showcase version of its site to the public in May 2008 and was acquired by Microsoft on 1st July 2008.

Cuil on the other hand simply tries to categorize and file a web page, even if the category name doesn’t appear on the site. That means users search the same way they are used to, but Cuil will try to return better results through its “explore by category” module.

A search for dogs, for example, will return category results for “water dogs,” “crossbreed,” “cocker spaniel,” etc. Some of these related terms do not include the term “dog.”