One website made a lot of fuss in the past month. The website cuil.com is a new search engine actually. Is it any good? I have put it to the test.

Like I said, this is a new search engine. Many say that this will replace Google some day in the future. We can’t be sure of this now because it is only at the begining. Others say that it is just another website that will fail very soon. The desing of the main page is simple. A black page with a search box and a search button on it. Also the Cuil logo is visible. Nothing very spectacular stands out. But, as we already learned, in a search engine, not the design is important, but the search results. Well, when you search, the first unique feature of Cuil is visible. The search results aren’t shown in a list like Google’s, yahoo’s or any other search engine. They are grouped in three columns. Also, the text right under the title is a litle longer than the one from Google.

OK! So until now just a fancy, but not very important, arangement. But is it any good? I have put cuil to the test. The first thing I have searched was SF-Zone.net (this website’s URL). It did have my website as it’s first result, but as the text result was just: “Copyright 2008 - SF-Zone.net”. I expected the last article I wrote (like in other search engines) but I asked for too much. Other results (2490) are from different directories or forums that link to this website.  Next I did a search for “SF-Zone”. Strangely, my website’s title was in the first result, but it was from a directorie my website was posted in. My website was just the 9 result.

Next search: “google”. Here another unique feature was visible. At the top there of the results there is a menu with a few tabs: “Google Search”, “Google Earth”, “Google Groups” and “more”. these tabs take you to the search result for that term. Another unique feature is that a widget is visible on the page that gives you the posibility to explroe the results by category.

Next I decided to really put it to the test. So I searched for “Image Hosting script”. this really messed the search results. All the results contained “image Hosting” and linked to image hosting website (similar to imageshack) no one actually gave me an Image hosting script (similar to the one on my website).

As a conclusion. It does offer some interesting features, but most of the search results are bad and not relevant. It has potential, but right now I will stick to google. They still have a lot of work to do until they can compete with Ask, MSN, Yahoo and finally Google. Will they succed? We will just have to wait and see.