You have probably heard already that Cuil by ex-Google engineers is finally out and open to public. They claim that they have indexed over 100 billion pages and are the largest search engine on the planet. That is al fine and dandy. But let’s see how Cuil stacks up in design and algorithm:

Design: Simple all black design for Cuil make it look like Black beauty (not the horse). But my experience with black pages shows that they all fail. Does that mean Cuil will fail? Not for this reason but I would’ve preferred a better background color. I guess that’s one way to differentiate yourself.

When you search for a term, the results pages are shown in three columns. The first two columns are basically are your normal results pages while the third column allows you to search by category, which is very neat. Overall, I like the design though it could be too distracting. Reading items one by one is easier for most folks than looking at 3 columns at once.

Algorithm: I picked the term “Federer” to see what I can find on the Swiss genius. To my surprise, Cuil not only shows results for Federer, but also shows a few tabs at the top predicting what I may be looking for (e.g. Federer vs. Sampras, Federer Nike, Nadal vs. Federer). But the same search for UFC showed “ultimated fighting championship and United Fruit Company). Does anyone actually use UFC for united fruit company?

Over all, I don’t see anything that makes me want to drop Google and start using Cuil. It’s nice and cool. It’s different, but no thanks. I’ll stick with Google.