Cuil - a work in progress

Google has brushed off many a challenger (where art thou Lycos?). as it rose to become King of The Web. Others have taken themselves out of the running to become the next search engine giant (have you straightened your books out yet Fast Search & Transfer)?

Even the mighty Microsoft hasn’t been able to slow down the Google juggernaut.

But Cuil, a search engine founded and introduced today by a gaggle of ex-Googlers has Webheads hopeful the upstart will soon be able to challenge its former parent for search supremacy.

Cuil is a viable search engine for reasons other its cool pedigree, so say its boosters.

Cuil, an Irish word for knowledge according to the company, says it has indexed 120-billion Web pages or three times what Google has apparently has managed to sort.

Heady stuff considering only Cuil opened its virtual doors to the public today - right?

But if early returns are any indication Sergey Brin and Larry Page, Google’s co-founders/chief brainiacs, can breathe easy for the meantime.

Cuil’s first day in business was nothing short of a disaster. The site, which received a barrage of media attention leading up to today, denied users its requests as often as it returned results.

This is akin to Amazon.com being inoperable in the days leading up to the holidays. For an online business, it’s simply unacceptable.

The site’s layout is somewhat unique; it delivers a small number of results with graphics embedded. Interestingly, the site uses a black background which one Google imitator claims is a more power-efficient method to deliver search results. The option to choose between a two-column and a three-column layout is a nice touch too.

Semantics are one thing, relevance is another. Why use it over Google? The answer isn’t clear. Maybe it does index more pages but most people can’t be bothered to sift through more than 5 to 10 pages of results anyway.

Cuil’s got a long way to go before it can even be considered a contender to Microsoft’s Live.com or Ask.com, the No. 3 and No. 4 Web search players.

Its initial foray, though not without its hiccups, means there will likely be significant development in the field of search sometime in the near future. They just may not be found on Cuil.

Technorati Tags: Cuil, Google, search engines