A new upstart intending to compete head-on with the Google behemoth, has launched today.

The firm named ‘Cuil’ but pronounced ‘cool’ apparently, is formed of previous Google engineers, and intends to out-do Google at what it does best.

The new company is offering a new search engine at www.cuil.com that it claims can index faster and cheaper, a larger portion of the world-wide wibble than current leader, Google.

Called Cuil, from the Gaelic for knowledge and hazel, its founders claim it does a better and more comprehensive job of indexing information online.

The technology it uses to index the web can understand the context surrounding each page and the concepts driving search requests, say the founders.

But analysts believe the new search engine, like many others, will struggle to match and defeat Google.

Hard fight

Cuil, pronounced “cool”, says it uses more than 120 billion webpages to build up its index of the information it finds on the web.

It claims this is more than Google uses though the search giant has stopped reporting how much it indexes. Without revealing numbers Google claimed its index was still bigger.

Cuil claims that its technology moves away from the methods that have driven Google’s success.

Instead of just looking at the number and quality of links to and from a webpage as Google’s technology does, Cuil attempts to understand more about the information on a page and the terms people use to search. Results are displayed in a magazine format rather than a list.

The company is also trying to set itself apart from Google by not retaining any information about what people search for.