There's a new search engine, built by ex-Google workers. It's called Cuil (pronounced Cool). From this CNN article: "For starters, Cuil's search index spans 120 billion webpages... at least three times the size of Google's index, although there is no way to know for certain. Google stopped publicly quantifying its index's breadth nearly three years ago when the catalog spanned 8.2 billion webpages.

Cuil's results will be presented in a more magazine-like format instead of just a vertical stack of Web links. Cuil's results are displayed with more photos spread horizontally across the page and include sidebars that can be clicked on to learn more about topics related to the original search request".

So of course I went to check it out. I tried 'Gay Bear'. TubeBear showed up but with a picture of Marilyn Manson (?). Then BearWWW showed up with a 'TubeBear Profiles' picture accompanying it (??)... also the 'TubeBear Profiles' picture showed up with alongside many other search results. Very odd indeed.

I tried a couple of more searches. It was slow to process and some of the images came back broken. They just opened up the site today so I gather they are ironing out the bugs. It 'look's cool, but will Cuil be able to even put a small dent in Google's monopoly...? It remains to be seen.