How cool is Cuil (pronounced COOL)?

The new search engine, Cuil, seems to have caught the imagination of SEO commentators with much written in the last few days.

Cuil’s claims to fame include a very large search index (121,617,892,992 web pages at the time of writing) and founders who (mostly) hail from Google.

The design of the site is crisp and clear with an attractive black, gray and powder blue theme. Search results are returned in a three column format and include images from the sites in the search results.

It sounds like it has got a lot going for it, but in a few tests I did, the relevancy of the results was very poor. It may look good and may have a lot of pages in the index - but if results are not what you are looking for then things don’t bode well for Cuil.

Cuil’s founders claim: “… Cuil searches for and ranks pages based on their content and relevance. When we find a page with your keywords, we stay on that page and analyze the rest of its content, its concepts, their inter-relationships and the page’s coherency.” Unfortunately the delivery of this seems flawed.

On the positive side it is great that competition is alive and well in the area of search. Competition creates innovation. It seems that Cuil raised a tidy sum of venture capital to get things moving, so there is also investment money to help create alternatives to the industry leviathan, Google.

So, in conclusion, I guess I am a little luke-warm about Cuil.