This post is from David Peralty, a Canadian problogger, who writes at xFEP, another Grand Effect blog.

Recently, there was a big deal made about how far we have come in search online. It seems some people think we have come 90% of the way to a perfect search system, probably meaning Google, and others say that we’ve probably only gotten 10% of the way to a perfect search engine.

This makes me wonder if we need a new search engine to come along, or just new innovations from the ones we already have. A long time ago, a fair number of geeks were using Alta Vista, a search engine that was fairly well known, but not really Yahoo! like in strength. Many people swore by its results and were happy, at least until a little search engine called Google started picking up steam. Now Alta Vista is, for most, just a distant memory, and Google seems to be the new goliath of search. But with Google’s business interests more focused on advertising, are their results getting more and more watered down, and gamed by people trying to make a quick buck?

There are new search engines popping up all the time, trying to either capture a certain niche, or attempting in some way to outdo Google, but is the new search engine that provides us the exact results we want already out there? Could Google, Yahoo or Microsoft do something revolutionary to enhance search that would make it the only system worth using?

Really, the importance of this whole conversation has a lot to do with the ever increasing archives of content stored online, and our growing need to be able to sift through information to find what we are looking for, and as school starts up again, and College students run to College Crunch or the ever important Wikipedia for help, I am left wondering if online search will ever be perfected.

What kind of results are you getting from search engines? Do you use any search engines outside of the big three? Let me know in the comments below.

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’.