Pronounced “cool,” the new search engine at cuil.com created by former Google employees claims to have three times the amount of sites indexed as Google, ten times as that of Microsoft.

Led by Anna Paterson and Tom Costello, Cuil’s secret lies in the formula used to index sites, an innovation that has allowed the company to index so many sites while spending only $7 million and using 140 servers. (In comparison, Yahoo!’s search engine cost $300 million.)

First, I have to give Cuil some credit for making a nice looking engine. Although I personally don’t like black, the display of the search results puts them in three columns, with large chunks of previews. (You can toggle over to two columns as well.)

Now, being able to search 121,617,892,992 pages is most definitely handy. Unfortunately, however, the old “quality versus quantity” adage may apply. There is a lot of junk on the Internet, and those 81,078,585,328 extra pages that Google doesn’t have (two-thirds of 121,617,892,992) may not be the search results one is looking for.

In addition, how the engine ranks those pages severely impacts search results. Do a search for mildlyhotpeppers.com (my web comic), and you’ll find that the site itself isn’t even the first result. Do a search for nubmuffin.com, and…

Apparently Cuil suffers from high load every single time I search for it. Try it yourself. Now, the probable reason is that NubMuffin is a new site, and it just hasn’t been indexed. Just tell me that outright – I can take it like a man. Don’t lie to me and tell me you’re suffering from high load – admit that you can’t find it, and move on! Jerks.

Finally, do a search for cuil.com, and you’ll see that it hasn’t indexed itself yet. I realize that it’s probably useless for a user on cuil.com to be searching for cuil.com, so this isn’t exactly criticism. All the cool kids are doing it, though.

On a more serious note, do a search for “muffins in new jersey” (I said more serious, not serious). The results are very interesting. The first result, “prowler candy apple red links to pictures of famous …,” led me to a page that could not be loaded (it timed out). The second result, “Frozen Yogurt Monmouth New Jersey. Of Customer …,” is about frozen yogurt. I can keep on going. I see American racing, native americans, a shameless pursuit of paper products, honey bee research jobs, and “Powell’s Books – Once Upon a Tart.” Search the same thing on Google, and WHAT IS THIS!? The entire first, second, and third pages deal with MUFFINS.

Cuil, you might have a boat load of sites indexed, but to me that’s useless. As the BITS article suggests, sell yourself to another company -cough-Google-cough-, and the world would be a better place.

via Bits Blog