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Irish myths are the inspiration for the name of a new web search engine that aims to rival Google reports BBC Northern Ireland. Husband-and-wife team of Stanford professor Tom Costello and former Google search architect Anna Patterson have launched rival search engine Cuil. The search engine, www.cuil.com,  began processing requests for the first time on Monday.

Ms Patterson said Cuil’s search index spans 120 billion web pages, but Google has said it believes its index is larger.

Mr Costello comes from Drogheda, and the website said their name came from Ireland’s rich mythology.

It said Cuil is the Gaelic word for both knowledge and hazel, and features prominently in ancient legend.

According to the Cuil website, a salmon which ate nine hazelnuts fell into the Fountain of Wisdom and gained all the knowledge in the world.

Whoever ate the salmon would acquire this knowledge.

Appscout report that on Cuil’s privacy page, it’s worth it to note that logs of your searches aren’t kept and that your privacy is secured. Also note at the bottom of the search results, a link saying “Add Cuil to FireFox,” allows FireFox to add Cuil as the list of search engines in the search bar.

PC Mag.com say that by dividing different topics among different servers, Cuil can utilize far fewer servers than Google and return more relevant results, according to Patterson. Cuil’s server farm can host the index on just $5 million worth of servers, while Google’s smaller index requires hardware costing in the hundreds of millions. Queries to Cuil are routed to the pertinent server rather than through the whole server farm.

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