And didn't understand, or like, the outcome. Disjointed, ancient posts of mine showed up at the top with total misses coming in later. Whiskey Tango Foxtrot? Why the particular set of "ancient" postings of mine at the top? Cuil defines me oddly and not at all accurately (measuring by recent history, volume and type of recents writings/postings, etc).

Google does a better job as yet.

I don't like the format of Cuil search hits... much easier to scroll down a list, and no preferences to change it (i do this for file folders too).

Googling/Cuiling myself, the whole first page is me, and on Cuil, only on the second page do I find myself...

(A couple actresses have similarish names... one the first name completely the same but dift last name, the second an additional "s" on the last name and her first name is the first 5 letters of mine...). But Google will recognize that difference and find my name first.

Google found my blog name, and some things I have signed under it... Cuil found nada...

If you are looking for something more well-known, Cuil might be terrific.... but for obscure things Google appears better, based on this very unscientific sampling :)

Where should one go to find out about the new search engine called "cuil" I wonder?

http://www.cuil.com/search?q=cuil

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=cuil&btnG=Google+Search

Good thing Google does caching, too, because I doubt the actual website's going to be around in six months.

I've only read vague poorly-written explanations here and there regarding this search engine.

Why exactly is it better than Google? What about the search algorithm, presentation of results, etc. is better?

Looking at cuil quickly, I'm underwhelmed. My first reaction: So what?

It brings up the same articles over and over again on different results pages.

It has pictures with most results - most which don't appear on the source page, many of which are completely unrelated and some of them are porn, even with safe search on.

The search by category is unrelated to the search or the results. I think it's paid advert space.

I give it a D

Like others, I look for myself in order to test a search engine. Cuil fails badly. Google finds a considerable variety of urls -- books, articles, columns -- with only a few mentions of a couple of others who share my name. Cuil finds one book -- over and over and over again. And the "magazine page" format is distinctively inferior to Google's lists. Underwhelming, to say the least.

OK, so the search results might not be great (if there are any), they distinguish themselves from Google via their privacy policy, they promote their Google pedigree...but I can't help but think that all of this "buzz" is really just a stunt to raise funding and an eventual IPO.

Otherwise I don't understand why they would have launched an underwhelming product -- you want a search engine to find things. Part of that depends on what search terms you choose, the rest depends on what's in the DB and how it's structured. So when a search returns 1000s of results on Google and 0 on Cuil -- it's not going to help me that Cuil won't be storing my private data! Nor does it matter how many pages they have indexed if the results are so underwhelming -- un-cuil.

After trying the ego search on Cuil, I found pages of hits that were all caused by one tech forum post I made years ago. It reminded me that I never got an answer to that question. When searching on my family name (one that's not particularly common) I got the usual hits of a college professor who's a distant relation, and also found a park and an airport with the family name that I hadn't known about before. Strangely, my wife's frequent on-line publishing didn't show up until much later. They've got a lot of sites to search, but need some work to make the results more geared to what people expect. Granted, that's for a limited ego search.

The grid format is a bit weird too. I find the list format much more intuitive.

In sampling Cuil I searched “le chesne” -a small town in France important to me for genealogy purposes. Cuil had nothing. Not believing that possible, I tried again, and again. Leaving off the “le” supplied results, but not usable results. In comparison, Google’s first 10 hits included a wiki entry, accommodations, map and Le Chesne Family History.

The same thing happened to me. More than one website of mine was paired with an incorrect image. One of them was funny, but not helpful. I'd rather have no pix than wrong pix.

I tried my work's name - seven words, and it failed. Google handled it. My personal blogs also rank lower on Cuil than Google. What's to love?

http://sbdcrn.blogspot.com/2008/07/is-cuil-cool.html

I searched my own name, and my site came up first, as did the home pages of other people with my name. Great. But next to my site is a picture of some guy? I can't understand. It's not even a picture that I have anywhere in my domain. So there pulling pictures from other domains? Just for the sake of having a picture?

Some of the text searches I performed returned ancient results, some over ten years old. I'm glad that ad sites don't come up like they do in google, but this is missing a lot.

It obviously sucks, dorky name and web search on my own name came up with nothing! Right at the top with Google. How can you beat that?

Yeah, it fails for me as well... that is to say the papers I've written don't come up first. What it did do, however was link me to completely new and different people with the same name, something that never comes from google.

To be frank, I've been annoyed with google lately. It seems whenever I perform a search, 'how to make dovetail by hand' for example. I either get the wikipedia entry, or a series of links that are either asking me for money to teach me said skill, or if they are 'free' they are liberally peppered with ads sponsored by google.

In cuil, however I get what the web was made for: some schmuck who knows something and just wants to share.