Is Cuil cool?

[thalaw2]

Has anyone else been using the new search engine Cuil?  I've been giving it a try and I just don't find it better than Google.  It's designed by the brains behind Google and is hyped as the biggest search engine but I haven't found it anymore helpful....maybe I need to give it more time, like learning to do tabbed browsing. 

[catwhowalksbyhimself]

Haven't used it much, but it seems like an interesting idea.  Plus the whole no keeping records thing makes privacy people happy.  It should at least be a moderate success based on that alone.

[Previsionary]

Since it's still in its infancy, it's hard to say, though I did notice it didn't return results for a few searches I did while yahoo and google did.

[Uncle Yuan]

I haven't used it, but I have a number of friends who are big technogeekz and we've talked about it.  Their consensus is about what you see here: as a search engine it does not seem to have any advantage over Google.  It has some bells and whistles which are nice but not a Google breaker and you will likely see them co-opted by the Big G soon.  My take: They may get some of the hard-core techies or those who really like aspect "X", but not nearly enough to make the average user switch.

[Lunarman]

Looks pretty cool, sounds pretty cool, I've yet to try it :)

But I will do now

[zuludelta]

thalaw2: Always wanted to know but never could find anyone to ask... I know Google, Yahoo, Baidu and other major search engines have an agreement with the Chinese government to self-censor results on search queries originating from mainland China (BTW, are the AltaVista and Technorati search engines still blocked by the Great Firewall?).

Does Cuil have a similar self-censorship deal in place or are their search results less restricted?

[thalaw2]

thalaw2: Always wanted to know but never could find anyone to ask... I know Google, Yahoo, Baidu and other major search engines have an agreement with the Chinese government to self-censor results on search queries originating from mainland China (BTW, are the AltaVista and Technorati search engines still blocked by the Great Firewall?).

Does Cuil have a similar self-censorship deal in place or are their search results less restricted?

I don't know if there are any blocks on the search engines other than Baidu.  Seems they come back with everything if you use the English version.  However pages with certain content (mainly adult content) are blocked.  Altavista works fine but Technorati is very slow loading...so much so that I didn't bother to test it. 

Like the other search engines Cuil seems to be working without restrictions, but I don't know what to look for in order to really test search engines out. I would need a comparison of a search from your end and mine to know for sure.   

[stumpy]

If Cuil had the same functionality as google, but with Cuil's privacy policy (no tracking search histories, no IP logs, etc.), Google would go from the top of my bookmarks toolbar to lost among the masses of bookmarks I may need sometime.

But, I don't see that, yet. Maybe I a missing them, but the advanced search features I use all the time (like searching within a domain, viewing cached pages, etc.) either aren't there are aren't easy to find on Cuil.

[GogglesPizanno]

Then there was the whole thumbnail issue where some of the results were grabbing less than family friendly (and in some cases, not so adult friendly) images.

Like all new web ventures given time to iron out the wrinkles it might become something, but for now it really was more marketing hype than actual super technology I think.