Cuil, The New Kid On The Search Block

It seems that the arena of search has been relatively quiet since the search wares of the late 90s, so it has been a welcome surprise to see someone else rise up to challenge the search status quo since Google rose to the top. What's interesting is that Cuil, the new 'contextual' search engine, hails from Stanford lineage, like its Google predecessor. Even still, it's gray and blue on black color motif tries to distance itself both as much as possible from the giant. This only serves as a distraction, since it displays results in 2 or 3 columns, making it difficult to scan for results.

One of the issues that I've had with it are its inconsistencies. Last night I search for 'Wayne Hartman' and was greeted with a page that told me that it didn't have any results out of all the 120 billion pages it has indexed. When you compare that with all the leading search engines, something like that seems disappointing.

Another issue that I had was broken links--especially for their 'About Cuil' page. You'd think that if you wanted to be a serious player in the search business, you wouldn't have broken links--especially on your home page.

So will I use it? No. Half the time it isn't able to return search results, reading it takes more effort that its worth, and I really question the relevancy of results. Meh, I'll just stick with the king of the hill for now.