Anna Patterson, a former Google search architect, along with her husband, Tom Costello, and a few other Google alumni, is trying to upstage her former employer Google.

Today, their company, Cuil (pronounced COOL) is unveiling a search engine that they promise will be more comprehensive than Google’s and that they hope will give its users more relevant results. Cuil has indexed 120 billion Web pages, three times more than any other search engine.

Much of the secret sauce of Cuil is in the way they index the web and handle actual queries by users. Both are costly to scale, and Cuil claims to have found a way to massively reduct those costs. That allows them to run the search engine a lot cheaper, even at Google-scale should it ever reach that point.

Rather than trying to mimic Google's method of ranking the quantity and quality of links to Web sites, Anna Patterson says Cuill's technology drills into the actual content of a page. And Cuill's results will be presented in a more magazine-like format instead of just a vertical stack of Web links. Cuill's results are displayed with more photos spread horizontally across the page and include sidebars that can be clicked on to learn more about topics related to the original search request.

Cuil also claims to have better search results than Google and others based on how they index websites. They do not simply catalog keywords on a site and then rank the site based on its importance. They also work to understand how words are related to return more relevant results to users.

Finally, Cuil is hoping to attract traffic by promising not to retain information about its users' search histories or surfing patterns, something that Google does, much to the consternation of privacy watchdogs.

"Our team approaches search differently. By leveraging our expertise in search architecture and relevance methods, we've built a more efficient yet richer search engine from the ground up. The Internet has grown and we think it's time search did, too," said Patterson.

Ms. Patterson left Google in 2006 to found Cuil. The new company has other prominent ex-Google employees, including Russell Power, who worked with Ms. Patterson on the large Google index, and Louis Monier, a former chief technology officer at AltaVista, a pioneering search engine.