Cuil: Good, But Not Great
Last night, the new search engine Cuil launched out of stealth-mode. As some had predicted, it seems Google’s announcement about the size of its search index was a preemptive move to take some momentum away from one of Cuil’s main features: the size of its index with 120 billion pages. As Cuil’s team features quite a number of Google alumni, comparisons with Google’s search are inevitable. In our tests, however, Cuil performed nowhere near as well as Google.
Layout
The Cuil homepage is a study in simplicity, with a black background, the Cuil logo, and the search box as its only major design elements. The search form is supposed to return typing suggestions, but this didn’t work for us on any browser we tested. Maybe Cuil turned this off for the time being to take some load of its servers.
Cuil takes a very different approach to displaying its results. Instead of a list, it displays results in three columns (though you can switch to a two-column view as well). Intuitively, it would seem that the most important results would be in the top left corner, but Cuil does not make this explicit. The top right spot is reserved for related searches, which usually displays either five or ten main suggestions and then, on mouse-over, slides open and reveals a more detailed selection.
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