cuil (pronounced) "cool" was launched today. Created by X (disgruntled?) Google engineers - it is pretty impressive.

Oh well, fell at the first hurdle....infrastructure...

No results because of high load...

Due to excessive load, our servers didn't return results. Please try your search again.

It probably did not help it was all over CNN and Headline news this morning that the chief architect of Google's search engine went off on her own, and dragged some top IT engineers (PhD types) with her, claiming to have built a better engine. We'll see what happens when the dust settles.

Not to throw a fly in the ointment but on Linux.org people who have visited cuil have had their browser redirected to porn sites and probed by anti virus programs. Not cuils fault. Just is whats happening. I haven't checked the new posts to see what they say but here is the link if you care to check it out.
Warning About Cuil!! - Linux Forums

people who have visited cuil have had their browser redirected to porn sites

Ummm, it didn't say anything about being redirected anywhere. It said the results for the search pattern included porn sites and another site started an anti-virus site. Personally, it sounds like he got click happy and did not pay attention to what he was doing. That said, cuil does have an filter option to prevent porn results from coming through. If that was enabled and it still came through, that is a problem.

Its working today, I have to say I really do not like it.

The design is horrible in my opinion, search needs tons of white space to help you find what you are looking for quickly. The random picture it pulls back with the results is pointless and seems random in that the picture has nothing to do with the website in some cases. There is way too much text next to each listing and I don't want to look left right up and down on results.

I personally would never use this search engine.

After trying it a bit, I must admit my initial enthusiasm is short-lived. I don't like to see pages and pages of items. In Newegg, for example, I always change the default to 100 items per page, then I work my scroll wheel on my mouse. With cuil, 9 items per page when there are 75million hits don't cut it.

I might feel differently if the 9 were good hits, but they are not.

Enter: XP heat shutdown

and you get items from smartmoney on heat and survival in the backwoods and 2 items on Win98 with one about instalar e fazer disco de but!

Enter: XP heat shutdown unexpected

and you get 1 hit! (66.9K with Google, 973 in Ask, 90.5K in Yahoo!)

With all the fanfare that went into this launch, it fizzling out from the start probably killed it, as many will not give it a second thought, even if it regroups.

One idea I like is how it sorts finding by subgroups, then adds tabs to your results page for each sort. Neat idea, but it needs work.

A surprise was when I started to enter: tire reviews.... and it suggested Tire Reviews & Ratings and when I clicked on that, it reported no results found. Taking out the ampersand and I got 53K hits.

It seems one of their biggest marketing pushes is the fact its the biggest search engine in the world in that it has the largest index of pages. Maybe someone should have told them that having the largest index is useless if you cannot search it efficiently and accurately. I also see they have $33,000,000 in backing? I guess they didnt employ a web designer with that cash yet....

I checked it out and I have to say I wasn't impressed, just my 2 ¢