Stanford professor Tom Costello and his wife, former Google search architect Anna Patterson, have developed a Google rival, at last. Cuil indeed seems to be much neater than any search engine so far. It performs parsing of search results into readable chunks, categorizes search results by subject tabs and displays images alongside whenever they are available.

It is fundamentally different from Google's engine in both its rankings and in the way it displays information. It is also fundamentally different from Google in its philosophy: whereas Google records everything you do, forever it seems, Cuil does not collect personal information. Advertising will be based on the content, not on people's surfing habits.

For example, searching for "google" yields three main idea tabs: Google Search, Google Earth, Google Groups, and an additional "more..." tab which features a dozen other categories. The display of search results, which are ranked by their actual relevance rather than by their popularity, is magazine-style. The engine snatches paragraphs of relevant text and displays them with a title, a source link and a photo if available.

There is also a "Categories" menu on the right hand side, which attempts to determine the different categories of search results that fit with a certain query.

It has a "Safe Search" feature similar to Google's to filter out adult content, and a bar on the low end of the screen enables to advance through the different pages of results and change the display mode from the default 3 columns to 2 columns.

For now, there are only two options: to turn on or off Safe Search and Typing Suggestions. Both are on by default.

The engine, which was apparently down at times from heavy demand, has some serious functionality flaws which will hopefully be fixed soon. The most annoying is the fact that the different results pages are not really different or only the first page of results works. Clicking on the numbers on the bottom, which apparently correspond to a respective page of results, usually leads to an error page. Even when an actual results page is displayed, it is often very similar to the first results page, with the items in another order.

Although Cuil looks promising, there is still a long way to go before being able to actually replace Google. There is no image search and, as I have said before, the thing does not work properly yet.

However, it’s definitely something that we’ll keep our eyes on and see how it evolves. The innovative search engine is backed by serious technological and financial muscle. The best thing about Cuil is their philosophy. I use Google a lot but they have serious privacy issues, highlighted by the latest Viacom lawsuit. I don’t need somebody recording everything I search for, every video I watch, and so forth. It’s downright outrageous.

The word "cuil" (pronounced "cool") comes from the Gaelic for knowledge and hazel. The Cuil founding staff also includes former Googlers Russell Power and Louis Monier. The company claims to have a larger index than any other search engine, with about 120 billion web pages. However, as I noted above, displaying them on a single results page won't work.