Google faces a challenge from a Silicon Valley start-up that
claims to have launched the internet's biggest search engine. Cuil,
pronounced "cool", reckons its search index is three times larger
than Google's.
Cuil, which is the Gaelic word
for knowledge says that it has indexed 120 billion web pages,
ranking them by content rather than popularity.
But Google believes that
its index is the largest. And on Friday, its web search
infrastructure team made a
blog posting saying that it regularly scans one trillion unique
web links.
It said that Google does not index them all because they either
point to similar content or would diminish the quality of its
search results in some other way. The posting did not quantify the
size of Google's index.
It said: "We've known it for a long time: the web is big. The
first Google index in 1998 already had 26 million pages, and by
2000 the Google index reached the one billion mark.
"Over the past eight years, we have seen a lot of big numbers
about how much content is really out there. Recently, even our
search engineers stopped in awe about just how big the web is these
days, when our systems that process links on the web to find new
content hit a milestone: 1,000,000,000,000 unique URLs on the
web."
Cuil, in a description on
its site, says: "Rather than rely on superficial popularity
metrics, Cuil searches for and ranks pages based on their content
and relevance." It features a magazine-style layout rather than a
single vertical stack.