A team of former Google employees is planning the launch of a new search engine that will not only rival the market leader, but also exceed its capabilities. The plan of Cuil Inc. is to cover three times the number of Web pages indexed by Google and provide users with more relevant results. Google hasn't made any comments on the news yet.

Anna Patterson, who left the search giant in 2006 in order to materialize her own plans of delivering a better, more comprehensive way of searching the Internet, together with her husband, Tom Costello, and the team of engineers at Cuil, are launching the new service on Monday.

As the Web continues to grow at impressive rates, it’s getting harder for search engines to keep up with it, Tom Costello, CEO and founder of Cuil, explained. However, things will begin to change, as Cuil promises to place “nearly the entire Web at the fingertips of every user.”

Cuil comes to answer some issues reported by Google users, who have complained that the search engine favors the more popular websites. However, this hasn’t stopped Google from keeping a strong leading position on the search market.

This year, Google maintained a significant distance from its two largest rivals, Yahoo and Microsoft. None of the two managed to really compete with Google, and it’s not going to be an easy task for the newcomer, Cuil.

Cuil will provide users with organized and relevant results based on content analysis for each page and analyzing the concepts behind each query. The search engine will then group similar search results and sort them by category.

On the other hand, Google is not only the most used search engine on the Internet, but it also remained the incontestable leader on the U.S. market as well, with 61.5 percent of total searches conducted, followed by Yahoo with 20.9 percent and Microsoft with 9.2 percent.

Although Google has been discrete about the exact size of its index, Cuil promises three times as much. Last week, Google announced reaching a new milestone, counting 1 billion unique URLs on the Web, a number that doesn’t include duplicates of pages with similar content.

However, the team of engineers at Cuil is confident that a new approach to search will make the difference. As Anna Patterson, Cuil founder and CEO, explained, they’ve managed to build a more efficient yet richer search engine that will help search grow at the same pace with the Internet.

Tom Costello researched and developed search engines at Stanford University and IBM, while his wife, Anna Patterson is best known for her collaboration with Google, where she designed the company’s search index and led a Web page ranking team.

Together with Russell Power, former Google employee, Costello and Patterson formed Cuil “to give users the opportunity to explore the Internet more fully and discover its true potential.”

Cuil promises to be the biggest Internet search engine, with over 120 billion indexed Web pages, capable of offering organized results, ranked by the content on each page and not on popularity, as well as complete privacy protection (the company said it will not keep any personally identifiable information on users or their search histories).