Cuil layout, not so Cuil reliabilty.

A new search engine launched today.

Cuil (Cool) is the brainchild of a former Google engineer and her husband,  a Stanford CS Professor. The launch has come with great fanfare, and Cuil is billing itself as having over 120 billion pages in its index. Per Cuil, that's three times more than Google (though Google disagrees). Impressive if you're the quantity over quality type.

We've taken a little time to tinker with Cuil this morning, and we have come away... decidedly underwhelmed. They have a neat layout, and try to do some of the categorization and sorting work for you, but the core search system just doesn't seem to stack up. On top of the less-than-reliable relevance system, Cuil is having all sorts of problems keeping up with demand.

Maybe they weren't prepared for the deluge of visitors. I heard a quick bit on Marketplace, and there is no shortage of buzz on the tech sites. Still, I'd expect the Cuil servers to at least be able to answer my queries. In my searches, I've received timeouts or error messages on about 50% of my requests. Also, I've learned to beware of the back button, as it seems to have unpredictable results when paging through your matches.

Also, I think the logic they're using to pull those tiny thumbnails could use a little tweaking. I'm not sure what that thing is supposed to be, but it definitely doesn't have anything to do with Congruent Media.

It's great that new engines are popping up and trying to knock Google from its pedestal. Competition is good for everyone, and anything that pushes the envelope will make all of our lives easier (.... and our SEO team cringes). Cuil could use a little work in the scalability and relevance departments, but we're hoping they get over the hump and introduce a little more variety to the search space. Maybe they should retroactively call this a Beta launch.