Anna Patterson’s last Internet search engine technology was so admiring that industry leader Google Inc. acquired the technology in 2004 to upgrade its own system.

Today, Anna Patterson believes her latest invention is even more valuable. However, the technology is not intended for sale. Instead, she intends to upstage Google, which she quit in 2006 to develop a more efficient and comprehensive way to scour the Internet.

Cuil (pronounced “cool”), an impressive new search engine, which is backed by $33 million in venture capital, had kept a low profile while Patterson, her husband, Tom Costello, and two other former Google engineers, Louis Monier and Russell Power, researched for better ways to search.

Patterson joined Google in 2004 after she developed and sold Recall, a search index that probed old Websites for the Internet Archive. Patterson and Power worked on the same team at Google. On the other hand, Monier is best known as the former chief technology officer of AltaVista, which was considered the best search engine before Google came along in 1998. Monier also helped develop the search engine on eBay’s online auction site.

The trio of former Googlers are teaming up with Patterson’s husband, Costello, who invented a once-promising search engine called Xift in the late 1990s. Later on, Costello joined IBM Corp., where he worked on an “analytic engine” called WebFountain. Moreover, Costello’s Irish heritage inspired Cuil’s odd name. The name was derived from a character named Finn McCuill in Celtic folklore.

Patterson enjoyed her time at Google. However, she became disenchanted with the company’s approach to search. According to Patterson, Google has looked pretty much the same for 10 years now and it will look the same a year from now.

Cuil’s search index spans 120 billion WebPages. Patterson believes that is at least three times the size of Google’s index, although there is no approach to measure it. In addition, nearly three years ago, Google has stopped publicly quantifying its index’s breadth when the catalog spanned 8.2 billion WebPages.

Cuil will not spread the formula it has developed to cover a wider swath of the Web with far fewer computers than Google. On the other hand, Google is not ceding the point, Google still believes its index is the largest. However, after getting inquiries about Cuil, Google asserted on its blog that it regularly scans through 1 trillion unique Web links, but Google does not index them all because they either point to similar content or would diminish the quality of its search results in some other way. Unfortunately, the posting did not quantify the size of Google’s index.

A search index’s scope is crucial because information, content and pictures cannot be found unless they are kept in a database. However, Cuil believes it will outshine Google in several other approaches, including its method for identifying, examining, filtering and displaying pertinent results.

Rather than trying to mimic Google’s method of ranking the quality and quantity of links to websites, Cuil’s technology drills into the actual content of a page. In addition, Cuil’s results will be presented in a more magazine-like format instead of just a vertical stack of Web links. Cuil’s results are displayed with more photos spread horizontally across the page. Moreover, it is also including sidebars that can be clicked on to learn more about topics related to the original search request. Yet, Cuil is hoping to attract traffic by promising not to retain information about its users’ surfing patterns or search histories, something that Google does, much to the consternation of privacy watchdogs.

Cuil is just the latest in a long line of Google challengers. The list includes swaggering startups like Vivisimo, Snap, Mahalo, Teoma (whose technology became the backbone of Ask.com) and, most recently, Powerset, which was acquired by Microsoft Corp. this month.

Although after putting hundreds of millions of dollars on search technologies, both Yahoo Inc. and Microsoft Corp. have been losing ground to Google. According to comScore Inc., through May, Google held a 62 percent share of the U.S. search market followed by Yahoo at 21 percent and Microsoft at 8.5 percent.

According to Allen Weiner, Gartner Inc. analyst, Google has become so synonymous with Internet search that it may no longer matter how good Cuil or any other challenger is. Search has become as much about branding as anything else. Weiner doubt that Cuil will be keeping anyone at Google awake at night.

Ironically, this will be the first time that Google has battled a general-purpose search engine that created by its own alumni. It probably will not be the last time, given that Google now has nearly 20,000 employees.

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