Ok! I have heard a lot now ! Well, Cuil is the newest search engine on the block, From the above image, the first thing that comes to your head is “OMG ! 121,617,892,992 pages” !!
Cuil also has nice looking interface (unlike google – nice logos though), But looks are not the only factor to decide which search engine is the best.
If you look at the guys behind Cuil, you`ll notice some of them are from Google, the founder and others from IBM etc. They have a management full of big guns !

So lets see how Cuil fares against Google in narrowing down results from today’s one of the most prominent markets…The Internet.

• Test 1 : Interface
• Test 2 : Average default Loading Times for any search
• Test 3 : Search Results
• Conclusion

Test 1 : Interface

Cuil Interface v/s Google Interface

Cuil Interface v/s Google Interface – Results

Cuil

The home page is neat, clean and pretty ! Quite appealing to the eye ! The Search box is well placed. There is an autosuggest feature as well. When you search for a result, the page is displayed in 3 different coloumns (you can change the way it is displayed i.e 2 or 3 coloumns), which I found quite wierd (since I am used to google results perhaps ?!). The keyword I used was ‘hosting’ and I got a neat AJAX powered category box to help me refine my search, nice !
Thumbnails for every site in the result is displayed.
To goto the next page, there was a neat tab. It was a good feature to add

Overall, people may find it appealing. The look is a boon for newbies surely !

Google

Ok ! Now I bet everyone must have googled once in a while, anyways, the same old classic google home page. Sometimes the results page tends to get cluttered with ads all around when you are searching for a particular keyword, but in general the look is plain.
To goto the next page, I had to scroll down all the way, till I found Gooooooooogle

EDIT :
If you want to try google with the cool autosuggest feature, you can visit here http://www.google.com/webhp?complete=1&hl=en
Thanks Andycolden.

Test 2 : Loading Times

For testing the loading times, I used pingdom.com. The unique thing about the tool in this site is that it loads everything i.e HTML,CSS,RSS any Scripts if present etc. I had searched for “php mysql tutorial” in both Cuil.com and google.com. The graphs are respectively posted below.

Cuil took approx 4sec.

Google took approx 0.7sec.

Since Cuil tends to load a particular website’s logo image or so, the time taken for cuil to load a page is more compared to Google. But then hey ! you can`t have everything together right ?!

Test 3 : Search Results

Now this is the most important of all the tests ! Everyone wants the best results ! So lets put our search engines to the test ! I obviously couldn`t run a full comprehensive search. But there are some things I have noticed.

1. For one, Cuil rarely returned any wikipedia results (atleast for me). Some keywords I used to search were nouns (names of prominent people), names of different places. I guess Cuil hasn`t given much preference to wikipedia pages or so.
2. Keyword: ‘country India’ – Returned results completely irrelevant, while Keyword: ‘India country’ displayed good results. (Cuil returned 65,000 results while google returned 36,000,000 results)
   Google also displayed much relevant pages compared to Cuil with the above keywords.
3. According to Cuil’s technology, it ranks pages on the basis of its content and not on the basis of clicks. Currently it claims to have indexed 120billion pages.
4. I wanted to know more details about the latest iphone 3g. So I used, Keyword: ‘iphone 3g july 2008′. returned 257 results in cuil which were not that satisfying since none of the results were fresh, while google was able to retrieve the latest information with ease.

Cuil has recieved tremendous response despite being released with barely any publicity. Check the following graph by alexa.com

Amazing response ! After 3 days the rank was 1,090,420

Conclusion

In general, Cuil.com is a good search engine. The results were a bit monotonous. The Search Index is very impressive, the collection is large, but it needs to be constantly updated with new pages. I couldn’t get fresh results using cuil.com and sometimes the results were completely irrelevant.

As of now I am still sticking to google.com, but I`ll surely give cuil try for its neat interface and nice autosuggest feature and tabs based on your search query.

Overall : Cuil – Good Index, Results still need more polishing