Largest index in the world – Google is now second.
They claim to be the next Google killer.

Techcrunch also has a review

Here is a sample search
http://www.cuil.com/search?q=seo

Here is their press release explaining their mission
http://www.cuil.com/info/news_press/

120 billion pages including 100 billion spam pages?

I saw an article posted about Cuil on New York Times:
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/28/technology/28cool.html?ref=technology

Cuil.com has a few Google Alumni on their staff:
Anna Patterson (President and Founder)
Russell Power (VP of Engineering and Founder)
Louis Monier (VP of Products)

My Opinion about the service:
They force you to view your results in either 2 columns or 3 columns. Why can't I view my results in a standard top-bottom list?

The system will occasionally give you the impression that there aren't any results for a query when their systems are busy.

Example:
We didn’t find any results for “google blogoscoped”
Some reasons might be...

* a typo. Please check your spelling.
* your search includes a term that is very rare. Try to find a more common substitute.
* too many search terms. Please try fewer terms.
Finally, try to think of different words to describe your search.

A simple refresh will usually bring up results for the exact term that just failed for you. This might be a scaling issue that will get fixed soon.

The drilldown categories are not always accurate for what your searching on.

If I search on my own name, the drilldown only populates with search categories that relate to Dan Colehour the country singer.

If you search on Robert Scoble, the drilldown populates with American Bloggers with 3 separate bloggers listed but if I search on Philip Lenssen, the drilldown populates with Dutch Television Actors and Dutch Film Actors. Why doesn't it populate with Dutch Bloggers?

So far, I wouldn't make a switch to using just Cuil.com. It still has some growing to do.

Here is the TechCrunch review:
http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/07/27/google-beats-cuil-hands-down-in-size-and-relevance-but-that-isnt-the-whole-story/

Search for cuil in thier site and you wont get their pages in the resutls :-)

It doesn't respect robots.txt:
http://www.cuil.com/search?q=picasaweb.google.com&sl=long

there are tons of spam pages:
http://www.cuil.com/search?q=docs.google.com%20&sl=long

the relevancy is poor:
http://www.cuil.com/search?q=iphone&sl=long
http://www.cuil.com/search?q=google%20killers&sl=long

and the column layout is confusing and difficult to read.

I like the query suggestions, the related searches and the nice use of Wikipedia categories.

"Due to overwhelming interest, our Cuil servers are running a bit hot right now. The search engine is momentarily unavailable as we add more capacity."

Wasn't overly impressed with their relevancy or coverage either, though the later might be down to the 'returns nothing when the servers are busy' bug Colin mentioned. That possibility didn't occur to me at the time, and now the servers are down I can't check :(

I think it's working again.

[moved]

Some Google Alumnie created a new search robot named Cuil (cuil.com) (pronounce Cool).

It seams to cover a greater part of the web than google even with less computers.

You can read the complete story here:
http://news.wired.com/dynamic/stories/G/GOOGLE_CHALLENGER?SITE=WIRE&SECTION=HOME&TEMPLATE=DEFAULT&CTIME=2008-07-28-00-09-23

I test this always by egosurfing myself. That was a great disappointment.... Now relevant SERPs on the first page. With Google plenty of them....

How do you like this new search engine?

When I tried to search for my name, it said it found 600 results while I was only able to view 7. Why is that?

Here is a screenshot:
http://img411.imageshack.us/img411/8055/coolaf1.jpg

Also when I try searching for most of popular music websites and music forums in Egypt, I either get no results or get poor results. For example try searching for mazikaty, you wont find the sites homepage which is mazikaty.com among the results.

In the queries I tried, the small thumbnail images are taken from different pages than the articles that they are next to!

That's very misleading (deceitful even) because the thumbnails are not even hyperlinked back to the correct pages.

Is basic search really the problem that needs to be solved today though? It was in big need of fixing around a decade ago, but not so much today (not to say Google and Yahoo are doing a perfect job, of course they're not...). Will have to give Cuil a better look later but the first query I tried did not return results which were as relevant as Google's.

I've given it another try now that it's back up. Better results than before, but definitely not as relevant as Google. The major difficiency I see is that it doesn't seem to consider 'link text' relevant.

As search for my name returns a bunch of articles that mention my name in a link to my blog, but my blog doesn't appear anywhere in the first dozen pages. In Google it's the first two results.

From the "About" page

<<Cuil is an old Irish word for knowledge. For knowledge, ask Cuil.>>

LIARS!!! :D

Louis Monier works for Cuil??? Woot!!
For them who don't know him, Louis Monier is the creator of AltaVista and worked for Google for years.

Louis also worked at Google.

> Cuil (pronounced "cool")

I prefer to pronounce it "Quill".

[moved from "Cuil's Search Interface" -Philipp]

I love Cuil's start page inspired search interface. Google should consider using that interface for Google News search results.

Pretty slow ... and sure, with their launch, they are getting tons more traffic than usual, but hopefully they are set to scale as Google's daily traffic is even tons more than they are seeing now.

But nice to see some competition for the big "G" – good luck to 'em.

I'm surprised no one has asked the all important question yet:
"WHERE ARE THE ADS?" :)

Ads? Who needs ads when you have venture capital instead? And multiple rounds of it. For ads, they would have to build out an ad network first. Its about getting all them eyeballs now.
Down the road, if they ever gain a decent-sized user base and some non-Google functionality, then MS can swoop in, scoop them up and add them to their search trophy case.

Even though the results are as irrelevant as possible, I still believe their search result layout is great. (If the images would be a bit more relevant of course). The categories are also better then the ones searchme has, still overall they need LOTS and LOTS of improvement and get a more organized index...

Be careful there:
"It’s also one that you need to be careful spelling, as culi.com is an Italian porn site."

http://www.crunchgear.com/2008/07/28/cuil-search-engine-reinventing-the-wheel/
(via TechCrunch)

I got extremely irrelevant pictures next to the snippets when searching for [blogoscoped]. Additionally, with the way they lay-out the results, it's hard to see a clear ranking (among other layout issues, but I guess it's all unimportant anyway because whatever layout they pick, the relevancy algos are still extremely bad).

http://blogoscoped.com/files/cuil-pics.png

"when you search with Cuil, we do not collect any personally identifiable information, period. We have no idea who sends queries: not by name, not by IP address, and not by cookies"

:D

[moved from "Cuil released". Thanks Hebbet!]

I'm surprised no mention on this site about this release;

http://www.cuil.com/

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20080728/ap_on_hi_te/google_challenger

I tried it. I don't like it. The results aren't relevant, and I don't like columns. It's better for me to read a linear stream of results.
I tried some general queries, and then cuiled (new verb here) my name. I appear in the last page, being mentioned in other blog. Disappointing.
A search for "Matt" didn't suggested Matt Mullenweg first, for example.
And I stumbled upon spam pages.
It has a pretty 2.0 look, but it still needs some fine tuning.

I set my preferences to disable typing suggestions, but it still provides them.

Is "SafeSearch" a Google trademark?
Cuil uses the phrase "Safe Search".

Does it have any logical operators?
What is their syntax?

<<Is "SafeSearch" a Google trademark?>>

Doubt it, Yahoo! and Microsoft and Exalead all use it too.

Well, this search engine suck.

I think the founders should get back to Google.

From MarketWatch:
Five reasons Cuil won't kill Google
http://www.marketwatch.com/news/story/five-reasons-cuil-wont-kill/story.aspx?guid=%7BEF2DFCAB-2957-402A-974E-8FA3C7DC8018%7D&dist=msr_1

This search http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=site%3Acuil.com%2Fsearch isn't returning any results for me now. Did Google add a restriction that quick?

That's odd, I can't see it anymore either. IIRC I got around 10 results for this. Is this a data center thing or indeed some change? Can't see an update to Cuil's robot.txt or meta tags either. I'll add an update.

They need to fix the irrelevant image issue fast – this could lead to legal lawsuits. For example, search for "missionary" and find the result for www.mtc.byu.edu shows dolls in a comprimising position. People and companies are going to get cranky about this.

Otherwise, I wouldn't diss them yet – they could make up ground, but search is so difficult to do battle in because of Google's entrenched position. Even if you can find a radically more cost effective architecture to operate on, end users don't care about that. You've got to fix your relevancy and find some income before your venture capital runs out and find a way to bring users back. But this isn't easy after such a PR negative launch.

Cuil may look cool, but is not a good search tool

:P

We do reserve the right to remove search engine results from Google's search engine results, as we've noted in our technical guidelines. For example, lycos.com has a robots.txt that lets anyone crawl it:

User-agent: *
Disallow:
Allow: /

but that doesn't mean that our users want to see Lycos search results in Google's search results.

http://www.time.com/time/business/article/0,8599,1827331,00.html

Please note, that the picture is Steve Ballmer NOT Eric Schmidt

Raha, I think that's the point.

(Added an update to the post with Matt's comment.)

Since Google still indexes Lycos search results, maybe they should level the playing field and restore Cuil's search results to their index.

I have to say I am not thrilled that my competitors banner image is showing next to my site. Hadn't noticed that, thanks for the heads up on the image issue.