A potential Google killer?

Cuil (pronounced cool), is the newest search engine on the block. It’s been touted as a possible challenger to Google’s throne. Cuil has been developed by former Google engineers, and claims that it indexed 120 billion Web pages, which is three times as many as compared with Google. At the moment, there are no ads displayed on Cuil. Also, Cuil has promised not to retain users’ search histories or surfing patterns.

Anyway, I immediately went to the site to try it out as soon as I heard about it. The landing page is plain and simple, much like Google. The search results page is kind of “cool”, you can toggle it to display 2 columns, or 3 columns, and it is accompanied by a small thumbnail. There’s also a sidebar which displays related topics to your search. It is a tad bit more user-friendly, the search results and pagination always remains in your view as you scroll up and down.

However, after searching for a few different things, I started to find it a bit hard to read the results. Perhaps I’m just not used to reading search results in a columnal format. There doesn’t seem to be the option to switch to a standard 1 column. As for the search results, it didn’t impress me too much when I searched for relatively obscure terms, either displaying information that I wasn’t interested in, or turning up no results at all.

So, at the moment, it looks like Google has nothing much to worry about. But if you haven’t tried it out yet, what are you still reading this post for? Hop over to Cuil and try it out, and don’t forget to let us know what you think!