I really liked Cuil at first because it was really different and I am very annoyed by Google's (anti-)privacy practices, whereas Cuil promises not to keep logs of things you search for. However, as days passed, I and pretty much everyone else has started to see through the hype and realize that for now, nobody will really be able to attack Google, not even by far.

Cuil claims it has the largest index of all search engines, but Google disputes that claim. In fact, searching with Cuil leads to the feeling that it has maybe 1/1000 of the index that Google has. Uncommon searches lead to no results at all, whereas common searches only feature a page of results or so, and a lot of those are just garbage.

Indeed, Cuil displays search results much like a magazine. And like a magazine, it displays meaningless articles which I am not particularly interested in. Some analysts have labeled it almost useless, whereas enthusiasts have started to question their first impressions.

It's quite clear that I won't be using Cuil for anything, it really is much less useful than Google, at least for now. Overall, after the initial hype wore off, Cuil now faces an angry backlash from observers who realized that its queries are unimpressive or altogether useless.

The engine, which was apparently down at times from heavy demand, has some serious functionality flaws which will hopefully be fixed soon. The most annoying is the fact that the different results pages are not really different or only the first page of results works. Clicking on the numbers on the bottom, which apparently correspond to a respective page of results, usually leads to an error page. Even when an actual results page is displayed, it is often very similar to the first results page, with the items in another order.

Cuil performs parsing of search results into readable chunks, categorizes search results by subject tabs and displays images alongside whenever they are available. The search engine snatches paragraphs of relevant text and displays them with a title, a source link and a photo if available.

There is also a "Categories" menu on the right hand side, which attempts to determine the different categories of search results that fit with a certain query.

It has a "Safe Search" feature similar to Google's to filter out adult content, and a bar on the low end of the screen enables to advance through the different pages of results and change the display mode from the default 3 columns to 2 columns.

For now, there are only two options: to turn on or off Safe Search and Typing Suggestions. Both are on by default.

Cuil is developed by Stanford professor Tom Costello and his wife, former Google search architect Anna Patterson, with other Googlers on staff such as Russell Power and Louis Monier. The word "cuil" (pronounced "cool") comes from the Gaelic for knowledge and hazel.