Are you cuil?

There is a new search engine, cuil.com, that aspires to be the next Google. It’s pronounced cool.

Cuil is the brainchild of Anna Patterson, who quit Google in 2006 to develop a site that would out-Google Google. Patterson is working on the site with her husband, Tom Costello, and two other former Google engineers, Russell Power and Louis Monier.

According to an AP report, Cuil’s search index spans 120 billion Web pages and the site is backed by $33 million in venture capital.

There have been many pretenders in the past, so I don’t think Cuil is something to get worked up about just yet.

But the creators have interesting search engine pedigrees, and they are bringing a different kind of search result.

But is it what people want and need?

The results seem to hinge on including an image with each listing, and sometimes it doesn’t quite make sense.

For instance, the result for my affiliate blog includes an image for a WordPress plugin that I blogged about on April 30, 2007 and the image had an alt tag that read: WordPress Mobile Plugin.

So, I don’t get why they consider that to be emblematic of my blog.

Anyhow, this is something to keep an eye on… just in case it blows up.