An audacious bid to beat Google’s stranglehold in the web search business may have backfired as its attempted use may either make you blush or land you in trouble with your company’s internet administrator.

Former colleagues of the tycoon-geeks who founded Google have set up a rival – cuil.com and pronounced ‘cool’ – which promises to search three times as many pages on the net and bring you more exact information.
Unfortunately, those wanting to access cuil.com are just a slip of a finger away from Italian hardcore porn site culi.com.

The new venture, which raised nearly £20m from investors, has been launched by Anna Patterson, cuil’s president who indexed the net for Google enabling it to carry out searches; Tom Costello, chief executive, who was at Stanford University with Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin; and Russell Power, a former Google engineer.