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Cuil the search engine developed by ex-Google employees is getting attention these days. It is being touted as Google rival but is it really the case?

Cuil pronounced “cool” primarily consists of 3 former Google engineers. Its philosophy is to provide users with search results based on their content and relevance rather than some superficial popularity metrics. It seems to be a direct attack at Google’s famous PageRank algorithm.

According to Cuil:

When we find a page with your keywords, we stay on that page and analyze the rest of its content, its concepts, their inter-relationships and the page’s coherency.

Emergence of Cuil is a breath of fresh air in the search engine world dominated by Google. After all competition is always beneficial for the end user but the main thing remains that it must concentrate on quality of results. At the moment it is far from satisfactory.

Users are reporting that it chokes on some 2 and 3 words query and couldn’t find results.

For example searching “NY Mets” will display no result. You have to search for “New York Mets” instead and there’s no auto correction for that. If you search for something that was recent like “Madonna Arod” and you get one result, and that is to a parked domain.

Singular and plural or word also makes a big difference on which it needs to work upon.

The search results for keywords that relate to big established sites come out right. For example if you type Digg, you get Digg pages. If you type Nintendo, you get Nintendo pages. But when it comes down to niche and long tail specific keywords, the results are far from satisfactory. And in some cases it doesn’t even display any.

But they can be given the benefit of doubt because they are still new, in beta stage, and evolving constantly. Do you remember the time when Google came and how awful some of its search results were.

Developing a search engine indexing billions of pages is no childs play and it improves with time which Google showed and there shouldn’t be any doubt in any ones mind that it cannot be repeated. After all there is always room for improvement.

One of the obvious change Cuil has brought is how it displays results. It uses columns to display search results because it’s easier to read text when it’s in columns. That’s why publishers of densely written text like newspapers and family bibles use them. A user can switch between using two and three columns by clicking on the link at the bottom of the results page.

With 121,617,892,992 web pages indexed by Cuil, it is being touted as world’s largest search engine.