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Oh my goodness. Huge hype. Cuil, the next big thing after Google. Announced to be THE contender to the search engine colossus. Much fuss about nothing if you ask me. First of all go and have a look here to see why there was such a big hype about Cuil.

Even if you tried your best avoiding any kind of tech news, chances are high you still stumbled over a link that announced or otherwise talked about it. I, for my part, saw it on my Wordpress dashboard.

So what is Cuil to the average user? It’s a search engine that looks nice. Very web 2.0, very stylish, very soft and round. But does it work? I tried:

I work with networking equipment on a daily basis. One of the many annoying things to come across when trying out new drivers or software is “error code 10″. Now if we’re unsure what code 10 is related to in conjunction with a certain piece of hardware or software, we look for hints on Google.com. The way around this problem really depends on the hardware, drivers or software that is causing the error.

We need a good selection of possible answers and usually google finds those for us.

While Google gave me a broad, yet very valid selection of search results, Cuil merely threw a handful of half-way related results at me. Cuil may have lead me to a solution eventually, but the way it presented the data was anything but helpful. The excerpts that Cuil used from each link were not related at all to the keywords that I used in my search and didn’t provide any clue as to which link is most related to my query.

A screen capture of the Cuil search results

Google, on the other hand, bombarded me with a wide selection of spot-on links and excerpts that contained precisely the keywords that I used for my search tring.

A screen capture of the Google search results

My apologies for the chopped off screens of the search results. You can see the full results in the links I provided below or by clicking on the screen shots above.

These are the search results I get when I use Google.

These are the search results I get when I use Cuil.

To sum up the performance of Cuil, it just sucks. It just doesn’t provide the most relevant information right from the start and it doesn’t provide any insightful summary or excerpts for the search results. I went ahead and tried other keywords and most of the time I ended up with the same mediocre and not directly relevant results. It does feature some nice thumbnails for some results but that doesn’t really improve on the quality of the search engine.

Cuil doesn’t deliver.

Oh, and I almost forgot: How on earth do you pronounce Cuil?

Update: Apparently unable to practice what I preach and simply google for how to pronounce Cuil, I was informed by a kind reader that it’s pronounced “cool”. Kewl.

Update 2: If you thought that my example of how Cuil didn’t work properly, have a look at this result that a reddit user found. Amazing how much Cuil sucks.