Cuil - Not so cool.

I've read a few stories about the new search engine, Cuil, which is supposedly pronounced cool. Cuil's creators seem to believe that it is already poised to take on search giant google.

I've tried it out a couple times now and I'm not quite so sure that it's going to challenge google anytime soon.

My first attempts last night were met with error messages stating that the servers didn't return any results because they were too busy. I attempted again this morning by searching for "tour de france winner 2008" (without the quotes) and the first result on google was: "Sports News: Carlos Sastre 2008 Tour de France Winner" which was a good result. All of the other results on the first page were similar results.

Cuil gave me results about scandals, the 2006 winner twice, the 2007 winner twice, the 2004 winner, etc. I didn't see anything on their first page about Sastre or the 2008 Tour.

I also like the way google search results are just a simple list of links with descriptions. Cuil looks more like a newspaper page with results in blocks spread over three columns. I found it hard to look at compared to google.

While this isn't a definitive test, it's enough for me to not waste my time with Cuil for the time being.