CUIL (pronounced cool) is a new search engine which was launched yesterday (July 28, 2008). It is supposed to be a google killer, having been developed by a group of people that includes former google employees. So, after giving it a few searches, and checking out what it brought back to me, here’s my opinion. It’s next to useless. I searched on .net programming, and got a message that said there were no results. Hmmm…. OK, I searched on the term Lightbin. That’s not to common. On Google, what shows up at or near the top is my Flickr stream, www.flickr.com/photos/lightbin. Also, obviously, is this blog. Makes sense that those should be at the top, because it is not a common term. And the blog has lightbin in the URL. Neither of these results show up on cuil’s search. Lastly I searched on the term Canon 40D. Finally, some results that made some sense. Now I can comment on the display. It looks nice, because you have a neat and tidy little paragraph for each result, and each result has a photo. However, when you start scrolling through the results, you see the same photo icons cropping up over and over, even for different sites. So the photos evidently don’t directly relate to the site, or the search results. I really don’t see how this is better than google. Oh, and did I mention that on day one of cuil’s existance, their servers died. Oops!