COMMENTS
Yea, Cuil seems pretty piss-poor. I like how they think out of the box for search engine results like Mahalo, but the few searches I performed got me nothing I was interested in.
#4 - misspelling it as Culi.com takes you to a porn site. Great work, Cuil brand team!
Considering today is day one of this new search engine, I'll cut them some slack on the search results. I think their user interface design rocks! It's way better than Google or anything else in search. I'll wait and see if they improve search before passing judgement.
I'm not defending what I think was a terrible launch, but I don't think your points 1 and 2 align very well. For example, you assume that fewer results means that they've indexed fewer pages. However, that's not necessarily the case. I could build you a search engine that indexed more pages and gave you fewer results by lopping off everything below a specified IR score, if I set that threshold to be significantly higher than whatever Google uses to limit its results. Thus, even though I've looked at more pages, I've used a more restrictive score to filter your results.
p.s. That said, I agree with the comparison of the websites that Google hasn't indexed to the dust under your bed. If it hasn't been indexed by Google, it doubtful that it's worth your time.
I am compelled to point out that Google does not actually have 57 million results for "startup".
Excluding duplicate pages, it has at most a few thousand.
Cuil excludes duplicate pages from the get go.
Cuil's results still suck. But don't give Google credit where credit isn't due.
I did a search for the following: "vue d'esprit tutorial" and it came back saying there were "No Results."
Granted, d'esprit isn't a common word -- however both Yahoo & Google gave me thousands of relevant results.
Apparently CUIL got confused by the apostrophe.... That doesn't bode well.
I agree that while "d'esprit" is not the most common of words I think "closet doors" would be a pretty common phrase. Yet, when I did a search yesterday it returned no results. Today it does but if you keep refreshing the page about a third of the time it still returns "no results". When it does give results it gives me the option to explore by categories "Canadian Child Actors". ??????
"culi" is Italian for "bums" -- a fairly obvious internationalisation flaw then in their marketing. Whoops. Other than that, I like their innovative approach. They clearly need to keep refining the site though. My site is not indexed on there!
Cuil sucks there results suck, no special features like currency exchange spell check and math. Fuck you Cuil.