Cuil is all over the news. Started by ex-Google people to compete with Google. So far I have not been overly impressed, although it seems that they improve some every day (did they go live a little too soon?).

Very briefly, here is  how they promote themselves:

1. More pages indexed than Google

My take - so what? Does anyone seriously believe that Google is deficient because it does not index enough pages or show enough results?

2. Formatting of Results

My take - no opinion yet on whether it is better or worse than Google. On the one hand, it’s more graphically oriented - on the other hand, are we suposed to go down the page or across? I like Google’s better because of the lack of ambiguity - but it might just be because that’s what I am used to.

3. Quality of results

So far, Cuil seems inferior. I don’t have an axe to grind here, and I don’t want to get into analyzing random examples right now, so I’ll just leave that as an opinion based on a very small random sample.

However, it must be said that both Google and Cuil get the basics right - a search for ‘internet marketing ny’ returns www.salemglobal.com in position 1 in both search engines.