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It might work great for popular terms (although I haven't really tried any), but searching for a drug name (for example) returns pages and pages of spam and forum postings, which was the sort of thing Google's Page Rank was designed to filter. Personally, if I'm searching for a drug, it's because I want to know the facts about it from a reputable source; not trying to buy it through questionable channels (but that's just me). Cuil claims their algorithms are more relevant than the "superficial" Page Rank algorithm, but I'll let you be the judge:

http://www.cuil.com/search?q=zolpidem
http://www.google.com/search?q=zolpidem

http://www.cuil.com/search?q=ortho%20tri%20cyclen%20lo
http://www.google.com/search?q=ortho+tri+cyclen+lo

http://www.cuil.com/search?q=pseudoephedrine
http://www.google.com/search?q=pseudoephedrine

It might work great for popular terms (although I haven't really tried any), but searching for a drug name (for example) returns pages and pages of spam and forum postings, which was the sort of thing Google's Page Rank was designed to filter. Personally, if I'm searching for a drug, it's because I want to know the facts about it from a reputable source; not trying to buy it through questionable channels (but that's just me). Cuil claims their algorithms are more relevant than the "superficial" Page Rank algorithm, but I'll let you be the judge:

http://www.cuil.com/search?q=zolpidem
http://www.google.com/search?q=zolpidem

http://www.cuil.com/search?q=ortho%20tri%20cyclen%20lo
http://www.google.com/search?q=ortho+tri+cyclen+lo

http://www.cuil.com/search?q=pseudoephedrine
http://www.google.com/search?q=pseudoephedrine

It might work great for popular terms (although I haven't really tried any), but searching for a drug name (for example) returns pages and pages of spam and forum postings, which was the sort of thing Google's Page Rank was designed to filter. Personally, if I'm searching for a drug, it's because I want to know the facts about it from a reputable source; not trying to buy it through questionable channels (but that's just me). Cuil claims their algorithms are more relevant than the "superficial" Page Rank algorithm, but I'll let you be the judge:

http://www.cuil.com/search?q=zolpidem
http://www.google.com/search?q=zolpidem

http://www.cuil.com/search?q=ortho%20tri%20cyclen%20lo
http://www.google.com/search?q=ortho+tri+cyclen+lo

http://www.cuil.com/search?q=pseudoephedrine
http://www.google.com/search?q=pseudoephedrine

searching for "Miserable Failure" - gives correct results - a direct link to George Bush's biography.

http://www.cuil.com/search?q=miserable%20failure&sl=long/

Cuil does not know why cuil is bad but Google does. Two times out of three Cuil does not return any results for this query, and when it does all results are irrelevant.

The algorithm isn't just bad, it's horrible. I guess it's halfway decent for popular news items and such, but with the first technical term I tried ("Gödel's incompleteness theorem", in this case), well, the results are not looking so great. Compare:

Google vs. Cuil.

I mean, you don't even have to know what the theorem is to see how much better Google's results are for someone who'd be searching for basic information on it. I mean, for Chrissake, Cuil returned a bunch of garbage from what looks like a Christian theology forum on its first page. NOT RELEVANT

Does anyone else find it odd that clicking on the About Cuil link yields the following message:

"Oops! We couldnâ(TM)t find that page. Please verify that the URL is correct and try again."

It seems that a number of the company information links result in the same custom 404 error page, including the Contact Us link. I'm not sure that this builds my confidence in the search engine...

Do a search for Cuil and it doesn't even mention the service. http://www.cuil.com/search?q=cuil

Privacy is a hot topic these days, and we want you to feel totally comfortable using our service, so our privacy policy is very simple: when you search with Cuil, we do not collect any personally identifiable information, period. We have no idea who sends queries: not by name, not by IP address, and not by cookies (more on this later). Your search history is your business, not ours.

More precisely:
Logs

We do not keep logs of our users' search activity.

http://www.cuil.com/info/privacy

Is the job of a search engine to: 1) Get you to the site, and figure you will find your way around? 2) Give you many entry points to the same site, clouding out the number of unique sites on the first page? Google has pretty much always aimed at #1, with rare occasions where it puts the same site on the same page. Yahoo has been notorious about showing the same site on the same page 3-4 times, sometimes with and without the www, pointing to the identical site. 'Cuil' takes #2 way beyond showing the same two sites 8+ times on page one, eg: http://www.cuil.com/search?q=snowboard+helmets Search engines that don't focus on just getting you to the site... well they suck!

search cuil on there, and first page has: Properties for sale in Cuil Mhuine, Ireland - Properazzi Wholinks2me Cuil Aodha Chase Around The Windmill: Toss The Feathers/Ballinasloe ... Cuil Darach Lounge and Bar restaurant in Clones at ... but no search engine by that name.

John Harry Larsen (August 27, 1913 - August 5, 1989) was a

tough to find it out this way...

If you would prefer that we not crawl your site at all we are happy to oblige. Just drop Jim a note to that effect and he will place your site or IP address on our do-not-crawl list. Be sure to be explicit about the site to block as email address domains frequently differ from the site in question.

There's already a mechanism in place for this. It's called robots.txt. A simple
User-agent: twiceler
Disallow: /
should be sufficient.

The Cuil search engine did provide some useful results though if you want to go a bit further with their spider:

• PHP Spider Traps
• Perl Spider Traps

This Cuil search didn't return any spider traps and I am at a loss as to how the results connect to the search. Just plain weird.

If you would prefer that we not crawl your site at all we are happy to oblige. Just drop Jim a note to that effect and he will place your site or IP address on our do-not-crawl list. Be sure to be explicit about the site to block as email address domains frequently differ from the site in question.

There's already a mechanism in place for this. It's called robots.txt. A simple
User-agent: twiceler
Disallow: /
should be sufficient.

The Cuil search engine did provide some useful results though if you want to go a bit further with their spider:

• PHP Spider Traps
• Perl Spider Traps

This Cuil search didn't return any spider traps and I am at a loss as to how the results connect to the search. Just plain weird.

If you would prefer that we not crawl your site at all we are happy to oblige. Just drop Jim a note to that effect and he will place your site or IP address on our do-not-crawl list. Be sure to be explicit about the site to block as email address domains frequently differ from the site in question.

There's already a mechanism in place for this. It's called robots.txt. A simple
User-agent: twiceler
Disallow: /
should be sufficient.

The Cuil search engine did provide some useful results though if you want to go a bit further with their spider:

• PHP Spider Traps
• Perl Spider Traps

This Cuil search didn't return any spider traps and I am at a loss as to how the results connect to the search. Just plain weird.

Wheeee!!! I'm a bird!!

http://www.cuil.com/search?q=John%20Larsen

http://www.cuil.com/search?q=Cuil

They should index few of their own pages, before they index the web.

This

Searching for "Bill Clinton" yields the Bill Clinton Wikipedia article as the first result, but with a thumbnail depicting someone else (Thomas Kean?).

http://www.cuil.com/search?q=Bill+Clinton

Their privacy policy gets a thumbs up:

...when you search with Cuil, we do not collect any personally identifiable information, period. We have no idea who sends queries: not by name, not by IP address, and not by cookies (more on this later). Your search history is your business, not ours.

We do not keep logs of our users' search activity.

We do not record the information in your cookies on our servers; your browser sends your preferences to us with each search request. This way, we do not store any personal information about you on our servers.

The images put next to descriptions are, let's say, a little odd.

For example, I searched for 'titanite' (a titanium silicate mineral),

http://www.cuil.com/search?q=Titanite&sl=long

Not sure if it'll be fixed by the time you read this, but it had some nice My Little Pony type things next to the link to the Wikipedia article.

And, more seriously, I don't think the quality of search results on a few random tests I tried were anywhere near Google in terms of quality.

Jolyon

If you have modified your robots.txt file for Twiceler, it may take several days for us to re-read the file. If you need something blocked right away, please let us know.

Privacy Policy:

Privacy is a hot topic these days, and we want you to feel totally comfortable using our service, so our privacy policy is very simple: when you search with Cuil, we do not collect any personally identifiable information, period. We have no idea who sends queries: not by name, not by IP address, and not by cookies (more on this later). Your search history is your business, not ours.

Way to go!

from http://www.cuil.com/info/features/

Feature # 4 : Search term suggestions:

When you type a query, sometimes you'll see a search suggestion with an icon representing a website. Click on this link and you will go directly to that website. We let you look before you leap, because not everyone feels lucky.