• July 28, 2008

Several ex-Google engineers will unveil a new search engine today, according to The Associated Press.

Cuil, pronounced "cool," is backed by $33 million in venture capital and is the brainchild of Anna Patterson, her husband, Tom Costello, and two other former Google engineers: Russell Power and Louis Monier.

Cuil's search index spans 120 billion Web pages. Patterson told the AP that she believes that is 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 Web pages.--Tanya Irwin