I have absolutely no idea why Cuil is getting as much press as it is. Either the general level of savvy in the press is lacking or the CVs of the folks that are part of the Cuil project has captured someone's imagination. Sounds like some of both to me.
Can anyone really look me in the eye and tell me that this is going to knock off Google? Or even give it any kind of run for its money. I'm sure if it was going to, Microsoft would have acquired it by now in their desperate attempt to get any kind of growth in market share for their Live search.
I applaud anyone taking a run at providing a better search experience than Google, but I can tell you that this one is not it and I can't see Cuil being more than a passing story.
I for one found the interface confusing and I didn't see anything there that would have me going back. It is slow. It is bailing most of the time when I throw a query at it. And the results are so-so at best. I'll take the time to learn a more advanced interface if I believe that there is something worth learning, but this just didn't give me any inspiration to do that.
At this stage of the game, there are fixed user expectations for how a tool like this should function. I read left to right. And I read search returns from top to bottom. It's entrenched by now. Don't mess with that.
For one thing, the servers aren't even returning results right now. The fact that a search tool should be reliable is about as relevant as it gets.
