Just when I thought there was wisdom in Kelvin telling me that it information-based start ups should not recreate spiders to crawl the web but instead use Google as the "universe" comes a new search engine that not only claims to honour privacy but also indexes 3 times more web pages than Google! If you haven't tried it, it's called Cuil (pronounced "cool"). It's built by ex-Google engineers and works pretty well on my search attempts. Cuil seems to be doing a repeat of what Google was when it started out, clean, simple, and powerful. As a power user of Google, Cuil lacks the command line like options and advanced settings Google offers, but I can imagine Cuil appealing to the majority of casual users who simply wants the basic keyword search. I also imagine that Cuil can perform better than Google in extreme niche searching since it seems to crawl much farther and wider than Google. The other thing about Cuil is that it doesn't index search habits and thus claims to leave your privacy alone. Despite the skeptics, I think Cuil stands a chance to grow up and in the process convert a good lot of casual users and privacy freaks. Ponders: Is there really 3 time more universe than Google or are the numbers just fluff?