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However this time Patterson says she intends to upstage Google, which she quit in 2006 "to develop a more comprehensive and efficient way to scour the Internet", according to the report.
The end result is a rival search engine called Cuil, pronounced "cool", a name that is derived from a character named Finn McCuill in Celtic folklore and which is also being bankrolled by $US33 million in venture capital, and has already begun processing requests.
Cuil's search index spans 120 billion Web pages and Patterson believes that's "at least three times the size of Google's index", although Google stopped publicly quantifying its index's breadth nearly three years ago when the catalog spanned 8.2 billion web pages, but only recently it hit back with claims its index has topped 1 Trillion pages, but with no way of independently verifying that figure, its veracity is still unclear.
As for Cuil, it won't divulge the formula it has developed to cover a wider swath of the Web with far fewer computers than Google, says the report but Cuil also claims it will outshine Google in several other ways, including its method for identifying and displaying results, the report notes.
