There's a big new search engine launching Monday: Cuil. Developed and run by the husband-and-wife team of Stanford professor Tom Costello and former Google search architect Anna Patterson, it's pitched as bigger, faster, and better than Google's flagship search engine in pretty much every way. See video interview with Tom Costello, below.
I have not had a chance to spend much time with the engine. I'm getting open access to it the same time you are. I did get a preview. It's a very serious effort, and it has enough funding to get off the ground and become a player.
The most important difference between Cuil and Google is its ranking system. Rather than assigning priority to pages based on inbound links as Google does ("Pagerank"), Cuil analyzes the content of Web pages to divine their relevance to a search query. Costello bristled when I asked if this was a semantic search engine like PowerSet (recently sold to Microsoft). Costello said Cuil's search is "contextual," and that, "we're trying to understand the real world, not the Web.
