Its the biggest news today. Cuil is a brand new search engine that just came out of stealth mode. Most tech sites are giving it a fairly positive review (particularly TechCrunch) mainly because their search index is huge unlike those of other search engines.

Seeing all the hype I tried it out and was rather disappointed. Although the interface is rather innovative and it performs really well for generic search terms such as "Harry Potter", it fails to be a decent alternative for Google when searching for more complicated and real-world search term. Just try searching for ["free hosting" cpanel fantastico].

Also it lacks an advanced mode, ie. the ability to search a particular site, or for a particular file type.

However it can be forgiven for such lackings because of the fact that it is only a day old (at least publicly). As long as it continues to develop continuously it may succeed. Thats because the most difficult and costly part of building a search engine is the search index. It takes a lot of cash to crawl and index the web. With billions of pages already indexed, the only obstacle for Cuil is to build a great search algorithm. And thats only too easy for a bunch of geeks.