After testing www.cuil.com I can’t figure out what the buzz is about. I like the categorization feature, but that’s about it (and clusty does a better job). But the actual search results are disappointing and downright weird. Of course, I searched for my own name. When I don’t put quotes around my name, I get lots of hits that contain the words “robert” “l” and “weiner.” No problem there. But adding quotes doesn’t help; the results change, but they’re no more accurate.
Cuil also shows images with some of the results, which sounds nice, but the images seem to have been chosen at random. A picture of a golf-y looking guy comes up with a hit from the Nonprofit Times (a legitimate hit on my name). I don’t see that photo on the page, though. Maybe it was on an earlier version of the page, perhaps in an ad? Unlike Google, there’s no link to a cached version of the page. But no, that’s no it. I searched on my name without my middle initial and found a Wikipedia entry for Robert Weiner, Jr. — showing the same photo. And the photo doesn’t appear on that page, either. Who is that guy?
Cuil is definitely going for it, but it’s hard to imagine them doing anything but incremental changes to what Google’s done. And even that would take years of effort.
Me.dium.com has taken a different tack. We have a full web index, but we change the results based on the surfing activity of our user base (now over 2,000,000). It’s in alpha, but I’d be curious to hear your thoughts. http://me.dium.com/search