Today I stumbled across the Cuil (pronounced “cool”) search engine, which claims to have indexed more pages than any other search engine: 121 billion. Developed by former Google employees, Cuil features an incredibly attractive interface complete with search suggestions and thumbnail images alongside some search results.

Cuil abandons the traditional list-based layout used by other engines like Google and Yahoo, and instead uses either a two- or three-column layout for displaying search engine results. This type of layout tends to make it more difficult to scan through the results of a search.

One feature Cuil is lacking compared to Google is the extremely useful “did you mean…”, which is useful for detecting typos in search queries. Also amiss is the relevance of search results as compared to Google, but hopefully this improves over time. But it’s still a relatively new service, only launched in July of this year, and so far looks promising as a threat to the Google dominance.