The two-year-old counter-Google search start-up, Cuil (say cool), Irish for knowledge and notable for its ex-Google founders, finally hit the radar screen Sunday and got a lot of ink because of its DNA, a lot of the comments cruelly negative. (Cuil didn’t turn up in its own search.)

It claims to index the web more thoroughly than you-know-who, putting its number at 121,617,892,992 web pages, three times Google, and describing it as nearly the entire web. Google, in response, claimed more, but didn’t put a number on it. It’s not clear – how to put this? – that size necessarily speaks to performance.

Cuil’s supposed to understand context and what you’ve really looking for, a nirvana both Google, which just bought the Russian context ad firm ZAO Begun, and Microsoft, which just bought natural language search engine Powerset, are striving for, and says it collects no user data – which would make it very different from Google if it proved to be true.

It’s also supposed to be able to do what it does a lot cheaper than Google, which reportedly tried to buy the outfit.

Cuil’s founders include Tom Costello, who built the prototype of IBM’s search analytics widgetry, WebFountain, and his wife Anna Patterson, who architected the great and powerful TeraGoogle index of web pages.

Another co-founder is Louis Monier, the first CTO of AltaVista, the Ur-search engine, and Babel Fish, the machine translation widgetry (we use the word translation loosely) that AltaVista developed. He also redesigned eBay’s search.