An alternative search engine recently launched called Cuil. Among other claims, Cuil claimed that it had indexed over 120 billion web pages. I think because of claims like this, on it’s release it got enormous publicity. Another reason is that the founders made some big claims about challenging Google. The New York Times article states that Cuil promises to be “more comprehensive” than Google and give users “more relevant results”. After making so many bold promises, Cuil got off to a rocky start on the release day as its computers were overwhelmed by curious Web surfers. Even simple search requests were still being greeted with this message: “No results because of high load.”

So, to give it a test, I did a series of searches on Cuil and compared them with Google. I was not satisfied with Cuil’s search results and this is an average product that does not live up to its own hype. I’ll be happy to revisit Cuil after it ages a bit, but right now I am sticking with Google.