Cuil said its 2008 search index covered about how many web pages?

Cuil said its 2008 search index covered about 120 billion web pages.

Cuil launched in July 2008 with a claimed index of approximately 120 billion pages. The more exact figure reported for launch was 121,617,892,992 pages, which is why “120 billion” is the appropriate rounded answer for a trivia question asking “about how many.” Cuil presented its large index as a major challenge to Google’s dominance.

The company was founded by former Google employees including Anna Patterson, Russell Power, and Tom Costello. Cuil emphasized privacy and attempted to rank pages using a different technical approach from the leading search engines. Its launch attracted intense attention, but users and reviewers quickly reported slow responses, irrelevant results, and other reliability problems.

Cuil’s index count also changed over time. By February 2009, reports placed it at about 127 billion indexed pages. That later figure should not replace the launch-era answer. Cuil ultimately failed to establish a lasting market and its servers were taken offline in September 2010.