There’s A New Search Engine In Town: Cuil Review

Cuil pronounced “cool” (use a heavy Irish accent) is the creation of ex-Google brain Anna Patterson who said to CNN that her new search engine offers “better ways to search”.

I’m always interested in better ways to find what I’m looking for, so I visited www.cuil.com to give it a test:

What I liked:

1. Simple home page, ala Google

2. Suggestive search box (based on what you type, it suggests words)

3. Folder style tabs recommending additional content sections (nice, requires less thinking, I think)

4. More visually appealing than Google

What I didn’t like:

1. Results seemed scattered on the page, but this probably because I’m used to scanning the page from top-to-bottom and Cuil presents results in a three column format.

2. Some results seemed a little confusing since they appeared with images along side and the image may not be relevant to the content.

Even though Cuil has $33M in venture funding and it’s just a couple of days old, I’m not sure if it’s unique enough to make a dent in Google’s armor. What I do like is that fact that people are trying to improve on the standards and even change them and this is how we all win.

But the ultimate judge of performance is you, www.cuil.com