After many others and in my opinion before lots of others, Cuil was launched today. It differentiates itself by a different crawling method and an original display of the results.

Simple design, deeper crawling on every website, bigger interest on the different interactions your website may have rather than on the popularity of it, display pictures within the search results (like on Exalead): that sounds new and interesting. However at first sight lots of features seem to be missing: no advanced search, the only setting being a safe search mode, and my second search leading me to an outage… Well, let’s call it youth.

The search results are displayed on 3 columns (you can also choose to see only 2) and you will sometimes get an additional menu on the right suggesting different categories: thus a search for “Jaguar” will make differences between the animal the car and the Mac system. The 3 columns proved to be more difficult to read than a simple one-column display like on Google but that is also a matter of taste… I suggest you try out yourself with simple words like Cuil or Google. Not quite convincing yet but I personnally will keep an eye on it and check for updates and more relevant results.  Who knows?