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.

The homepage isn't much to look at, but I really like the format after you've searched something. However, some borders would be nice. It's a bit hard on your eyes.

As for the actual searching, I think it's merely adequate compared to Google. It works, and I think I'd use it over Yahoo or Ask Jeeves, but Google still holds the key to my keyboard ;P.

Interesting search engine. However, it doesn't make me want to move from Google to Cuil since there's no incentive. The layout looks nicer but there isn't any functionality difference. They both do searches. Except that Google does it faster and is guaranteed to be always updated.

For now, I'll stick to Google until Cuil comes with a bigger idea to compete. It's like creating an operating system to compete with Windows. It just won't really happen.

xboxrulz

Interesting point: Although I thought that Google's Index is 1 trillion, but apprently its not. There index was 8 billiion a year ago so it probably hasn't crossed 120Billion yet. This would mean that Cuil has the largest index ever. They were able to do this because they developed a better way to index the web. That is they have a more efficient method to index webpages than Google.

This is extremely advantageous. Because even if they cannot develop a search algorithm to match Google's they could always simply build their index and release it to others so that other search startups can build their engines by using this index. Google themselves used Yahoo!'s search index when they started out.

Other search startups have very innovative algorithms (particularly Powerset) but are struggling to build an index.