Cuil is a new search engine which the mainstream media seem to have an interest in. Personally, I fail to see why.

Cuil was established by former Googleplex employees, and the site appears to strive to be Google’s rival. Cuil claims to be the World’s largest search engine, with over 120 billion pages being indexed, but Google refutes this saying their index is bigger whilst refusing to give out details.

The search engine is, quite simply, a search engine but has several nice features such as:

• Suggestions when entering search terms
• Displaying results in columns, as opposed to a list. This is a little confusing!
• Categories (DMOZ based, I expect)
• Pictures from pages accompanying results
• Other related search terms being provided
• A nice black finish
• A really complex way of determining which link ranks where, which doesn’t use a ’superficial’ method like PageRank
• It doesn’t store searches

Cuil is a very capable search engine, which delivered quite a lot of relevant results I have never seen on Google before. However, it is quite different (interface-wise) and this will put many users – including me – off. The columns take far too much adjustment.

I also feel that Cuil simply ’steals’ features off other search engines, like A9, Ask and Yahoo, and puts them together in one place.

Cuil is going to be successful for a fear months, but suffer when its hype dies down.

As Jeff says: ‘Bottom line is that Cuil is interesting and will definitely be worth following, but it certainly is no real danger [to Google] as of now’.