If you’ve been able to get through the high traffic loads on cuil.com (pronounced “cool”, meaning “knowledge” in Gaelic) today, you’ve been one of the first to use the world’s newest search engine that is (in its own words) poised to dethrone the undisputed king of search.

Self-proclaimed to have indexed three times more pages than Google and 10 times more pages than Microsoft, Cuil is the brainchild of Tom Costello, Anna Patterson and Russell Power, formerly of IBM and Google.  With some pretty direct attacks on other unnamed search engines that “rely on superficial popularity metrics,” Cuil’s philosophy is “to solve the two great problems of search: how to index the whole Internet—not just part of it—and how to analyze and sort out its pages so you get relevant results.”

While I was unable to complete many searches effectively today due to overwhelming traffic to the site, Cuil appears to have great potential and I am intrigued by the service’s promise to “guide [me] towards answers to the questions [I'm] not even sure how to ask.”

Another advertised feature that is sure to attract attention is cuil’s privacy policy that can be summed up in short by their tagline “your search history is your business, not ours.” (It should be interesting to see how long this lasts.)

What do you think?  Are the other player(s) in for some trouble? 

Certain pundits think not, and a few have been quick to point out such potential shortcomings as having a name that noone knows how to pronounce as being an important marketing flaw.  (Nomenclature troubles didn’t seem to hurt Google much.)  Others, including $30+ milllion in VC funding seem to think Cuil is on to something hot.