JOHN HARRIS looks at a start-up search engine company that aims to take on Google.

Have you ever walked into a bar, looked for the biggest guy in the joint and then asked his girlfriend to dance?

That’s what a start-up company called Cuil has done this week by taking on Google with a search engine that promises to index three times as many web pages.

Apparently Cuil – pronounced “cool” – is named after the old Irish word for knowledge, which is apt for a search engine that claims to catalogue 120 billion web pages.

The Cuil website says it searches more of the Web than any other search engine — three times as many pages as Google and 10 times as many as Microsoft.

So I decided to have a squiz.

The www.cuil.com website is in stark contrast to Google. Whereas Google’s search page is white, Cuil is all black, except for the search dialogue box.

Executing a search retrieves another contrast. Where Google lists search results in pages of 10 items, Cuil offers a more “magazine” style, presenting 11 articles across three columns.

Putting it to the test, I looked for myself.

Entering my name in both Google and Cuil produced only pages about much more handsome Harrises, so I added the word Adelaide to narrow the search a bit.

Google found a page from my website and listed it in third position.

From Cuil’s 11 results, the only page that mentioned me was a magazine story I wrote back in 1998.

So I made it easier for Cuil by replacing Adelaide with Impress – my company’s name – to see if I even existed in the search engine’s database.

Sho’ ‘nuff, most of the search results came from my website, but the thumbnail pictures accompanying them were not.

The “John Harris” they showed came from my previous searches including a blue-gowned surgeon and a guy demonstrating his profusion of nasal hair (sadly, he did look a bit like me).

Alternative searches produced a profusion of pages from my old website which has not existed online for seven months.

Fair enough, I decided, perhaps I’m not important enough for a start-up search engine to pay attention to, so I turned my enquiries elsewhere.

When I searched for ”Cuil founders” in Google, it produced pages of results about the group of former Google engineers who have raised $33 million in Venture Capital to launch the rival Internet search engine.

It also found the Cuil website’s management page, which profiles the former Googlers including husband and wife team Tom Costello and Anna Patterson, who lead this company that is targeting Google.

Unfortunately, when I entered for the same words with Cuil, its first page produced no relevant results, suggesting Cuil may have some serious muscle-building to do before it is in a position to take on the biggest guy in the bar.

John Harris is managing director of Impress Media Australia www.impress.com.au

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