From some former Google engineers:

http://www.cuil.com/


"Welcome to Cuil—the world’s biggest search engine. The Internet has grown. We think it’s time search did too.

The Internet has grown exponentially in the last fifteen years but search engines have not kept up—until now. Cuil searches more pages on the Web than anyone else—three times as many as Google and ten times as many as Microsoft.

Rather than rely on superficial popularity metrics, Cuil searches for and ranks pages based on their content and relevance. When we find a page with your keywords, we stay on that page and analyze the rest of its content, its concepts, their inter-relationships and the page’s coherency.

Then we offer you helpful choices and suggestions until you find the page you want and that you know is out there. We believe that analyzing the Web rather than our users is a more useful approach, so we don’t collect data about you and your habits, lest we are tempted to peek. With Cuil, your search history is always private.

Cuil is an old Irish word for knowledge. For knowledge, ask Cuil."

Tried it when first launched. Not a Google killer, IMO.

So far, Cuil has only been notable for being laughably bad and serving up random pornographic images: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/08/01/cuil_apology/

Hot opening.
Closed in a hurry.

I was not impressed, even the first day. Sad, as I had hopes for Cuil as at least an option to Google.