Cuil vs. Google? Not Yet.

Implications: Google is a behemoth, but it rules because it delivers better search results than the competition.  That's how Google got ahead, and that's how they are maintaining their lead, against Microsoft, Yahoo!, and everybody else.  Does the Cuil team have the magic to beat them at their own game?

Analysis: What Cuil has made available is half-baked at best.  It's prone to errors, and seems to have no pruning algorithm to keep you from seeing essentially the same result numerous times.  The layout is distracting and makes you navigate to see everything, and the so-called improvements embodied in providing larger excerpts and images are either misconceived or too buggy to assess.  The images in several test searches did not match up with the search, nor in some cases did they seem even marginally relevant to the excerpt.  When I searched for people, the images weren't the right people (and mostly were not people at all, but some random logo from the page).  In other cases they were bizarrely irrelevant.  A search for a chemical instrument turned up repeated (essentially identical) mangled listings from catalogs.  A search for a company turned up several identical pictures that might have been bunnies.  In each case, the test searches had worked fine on Google.  For now, that's where you'll find me.