Watch out – a new search engine has been launched by a staff of ex-Googler’s who helped build Google from ‘04 on. Pronounced ‘COOL’, Cuil (http://www.cuil.com/), it is one of the three search engines to keep an eye out for (the other two are http://www.mhalo.com/ and http://www.wikia.com/).

This engine has real potential to gain momentum (once some bugs worked out- B2C OK, B2B searches severally lacking) for the following reasons:

· Biggest search engine out there — Indexed 120 billion Web pages, 3x more than any other search engine.

· Unique results — Ranks results by the content on each page, not its popularity. Cuil offers a semantic relationship of all indexed pages defined as it crawls a domain not done post crawl using the page cache. The idea being it will cut the time to understand the “general” meaning of each page and domain.

· Privacy protection — Does not keep any personally identifiable information on users or their search histories, which Google currently does and has privacy groups up in arms.

· Organized results— The magazine-style layout separates results by subject and allows further search by concept or category. It’s rather different and will likely take time for users to adjust.

Only time can tell what kind of impact Cuil will have on the search space, how it will monetize and how advertisers react to the new engine. Stay tuned…