First take: pretty interface, poor relevance = rapid oblivion - Bret Treasure

Well right now - "Due to overwhelming interest, our Cuil servers are running a bit hot right now. The search engine is momentarily unavailable as we add more capacity." FAIL - Atul Arora

Matt - Following numerous threads since the launch. Almost all so far 'not even close to Google' - Charlie Anzman

Got the "We'll be back soon" message. +1 @ Atul - BeeLing

How does Cuil compare to Microsoft's search engine? - Adewale Oshineye

On the other end of the spectrum, do site:http://www.cuil.com/ in Google. It has crawled the new cuil pages and they appear in the index and search results (including the unvailable page. - Atul Arora

it doesn't seem very relevant. My blog is not indexed yet :( Is the database exhaustive enough to be meaninngfull? - Jnuk: acidweb.fr from twhirl

try searching for your name on Cuil. Charlie Anzman has a great photo up for that - Sidharth Dassani

Charlie/Sidharth, I don't know why some images don't match the search results. - Matt Cutts

Nice to see you on FF! I promise not to Ban/Block/Delete you! Enjoy! lmao - Igor The Troll יִצְחָק

I actually quite like it, it sorts out stuff on the page in a more readable form than Google and quickly found stuff on other Sally Church's I didn't find in Google. Medical terms need writing out in full though, eg it returns zero for CML but useful stuff on Leukemia. I like the UI, it will get better with time. - Sally Church

Seems pretty crappy to me. My search returned results for sites that have not been in existence for a year (an old index maybe?), and one of the top two results on Google search for the same term wasn't even on the first page of results for Cuil. - Matt Devost

I really like the UI, the diversity of results, and the categories features. I think that I'll like the pictures as soon as they reliably match up to the correct search results. (I am not Kevin Scott Collins, for example.) Looks like they're having some issues crawling wikipedia given the number of broken wikipedia results I've seen. Overall relevance doesn't seem as good as Google. I'm guessing that will get better soon now that they've launched and are able to gather data from real users. My $0.02. - Kevin Scott

It's nice to see an alternative to the usual list of results. It's clean and easy to use. The relevancy of results however isn't very good compared to Google, and in fact it's also dished up some rubbish as well. The service has been down as well today. It feels like a beta to me. Mind you, maybe it's unfair to compare to Google results really, because this is us assuming only Google can deliver the right answer. - Ceejay

The interface is brilliant and truly fills a gap left wide open by Google (design can move beyond minimalism), Duplicate links need to be lumped together, this should improve the relevance of the searches dramatically. - Jamie Ginsberg

Most searches I did returned a bunch of porn despite beign in safe mode. When I turned off safe mode, the adult stuff went away. - Mike Seidle

i like the old way better - fijidaddy

My blog wasn't in it but fortunately a chinese spammer's copy of it is. - Sam Pullara

Matt - At this point, I'm just suckin' up all the different takes. It's already gone from interesting to just fun ?! :) - Charlie Anzman

The results are bizarre, even humorous at times, but we need to remember what yardstick we're using to measure the results. If it gives the exact same search results at Google, some will deem it a failure because it's unnecessary. If it gives different search results from Google, some will deem it a failure because they're "not standard." My only quibble is that in my vanity search, items in my blog seem to be drawn from last year. Perhaps a database refresh is all that is needed. - Ontario Emperor

Not impressed with cuil. Did some searches of my company keywords, results were not as smart/relevant as what I find with a google search. Also, I am not thrilled with the 3 column format, especially when the 3 columns are not aligned, which makes it hard to scan and find relevant links quickly. - Greg Bogdan

Very long way to go. There is no real regional specific search results. The world is a bigger place than just the US. To say that they have indexed 10 times the amount of pages is also silly. The good search engines will find the good/popular sites. If a site has not been found its fair to say that it just not that good (excluding brand new sites of course) More pages will not equal better results. - Shane Osborne

First take of cuil.com: they are not nearly prepared as they should have been at launch. It is irrelevant how many web pages they've indexed... if you can't respond to a user search query with relevant, useful results. In reality live.com does a better job than cuil.com. And we all know where live search stands. - Pre Priyadarshane

Results didn't match my expectation (which isn't neccessarily a bad thing), but the main gripe is the layout and point size of the results page. That blocky texty boxy results style isn't easy to scan and I think the point size is too small. Speed etc is something that can be fixed with hardware so just a temporary issue I'd say. - johan

I like the layout personally, and the categories on the right, except that the results are mostly rubbish and the categories don't actually work sometimes (links point to an error page saying there's no results). They say they're using contextual search...really? I'm not seeing it. For "Australian visas" the government website doesn't even show. The images are all mixed up, displaying logos from the wrong companies against the wrong result. Oh dear...what a catastrophe! - Ceejay

I tried searching for diggnation and the only result on the first page actually linking to diggnation webcast was a link to episode 57. The first 2 results were wikipedia. I think they have a lot to do as far as results are concerned. Maybe this is the next big failed launch after Wikia Search - Sidharth Dassani

The quality and depth of results seems thin and the images are just wrong. Now, if they can fix that then there are a few interesting issues, particularly from an SEO perspective. A left to right format may change the click yield for different positions. Is it as imperative to get to the first position, particularly with an F pattern eye-tracking standard. Conversely, the weight of the first page of results (text and images) makes me believe few would go deeper than page 1, increasing desire for page 1. - AJ Kohn

Some interesting observations from Bindu Reddy - http://friendfeed.com/e... - Atul Arora

Atul, good link. In my opinion, Bindu's absolutely correct that the "Explore by Category" entries are entirely from string matches with Wikipedia category pages. - Matt Cutts

In particular I found the description/page summary text poor. Google appears to have refined that well over the years. Cuil concentrates way too much on including the search term in the results as many times as it finds it, which makes the results look like scraped pages (even if they arean't). Truncating the titles and URLs also makes a difference to understanding what the page is about. The layout would work better if each result was the same height, with each horizontal result starting on the same baseline. And how about numbering them 1 to 10? All that said, I do like the more modern feel to it. I wish Google, etc. would mix it up a little more. - Richard Crocker

The only thing i like is their presentation of search results. The relevance goes for a toss most of the time. Its interesting if you try searching for "cuil" ...check the results http://www.cuil.com/search... - James Ramya Rajan J