I’m a die-hard Google-user and when Cuil Inc launched that they have launched a rival search engine called Cuil (pronounced “cool”), I only shrugged. But as with any new web technology out there, I was compelled to give it a shot.

First thing about the announcement that struck me (aside from the fact that they’re planning to take on Google), is that Cuil Inc is composed of former Googlers themselves. Now that says a lot about how some engineers view Google - either they’re content with how Google goes about doing things or they think that it’s all crap.

As of this writing it claims to have 121,617,892,992 pages indexed. But how does it compare to Google? They say that they take a different route in indexing and searching by prioritizing content over links and traffic.

However, a quick and dirty test searching the search word “lifespy,” returned dismal results. The first result isn’t even our home page. I guess you have to pepper your home page with your site’s name to get it indexed better, huh? Maybe not. Searching “basketball” gave a good results (the first one being NBA.com) and the results are even categorized.

Another peeve - it indexes spam sites.

Well, so far, it does live up to their own claims that they’re fast. But they’re still not growing on me. Will try it out for the next few days, though and we’ll see.