Is 'Cuil' really COOL?

Late last month Cuil (pronounced 'Cool') became the latest entrant to the search domain. Launched by an ex-Googler, Cuil is old Irish word for 'Knowledge'. Its claim of claim of being the 'world's biggest search engine' and its approach in indexing information based on relavance and content has generated a lot of interest and hype.Barely a week old (It was launched on July 28, 2008), it is seen by some as a threat to Google's monopoly over the search market. WOW!!

In a note on its website, Cuil says that it 'searches more pages on the Web than anyone else---three times as many as Google and ten times as many as Microsoft.' and 'Rather than rely on superficial popularity metrics, Cuil searches for and ranks pages based on their content and relevance.'

Hmm..interesting claims. I decided to test them out. I Googled the word 'Cuil' on Google and 'Cuiled' the same on Cuil. The findings were even more interesting

Cuil gave me 121,578 results. In the first ten results, only the first 2 referred to itself. Google on the other hand (kudos to them for fair play), gave me 2,200,000 (is this figure an approximation?) results. Out of the first 10, 8 results were related to 'Cuil'. Impressive!!

I guess it will take some time before the claims of 'ranking pages based on its relevance can be met' and on a personal note, the black background will have to go.