No, it isn’t. It sucks. The layout is a lot more appealing than Google’s, but searching through results is very inconvenient. You just can’t find what you’re looking for in pages composed of squares of randomly placed results. In Google, you get a clear list of the results you are looking for. Here’s an example: I searched Google for “Windows.” This is quite a popular search and people are clearly looking for Microsoft’s family of operating systems. Here are the first 5 results: As you can see, the results are clear and relavant. The first one of course being Microsoft’s site, the second – the Windows section of Microsoft’s site, 3rd a Wikipedia article about Windows and so on… But let’s see what happens when we search Cuil for “Windows”:

Apart from being inconveniently placed, the results are also irrelevant to the search. The first of the  results is, of course, a link to an educational site about our solar system. The rest of the results are seemingly-random Windows-compatible software, but where is Microsoft’s site? Nowhere to be found. So much for relevancy. Come on, even searching for rhinoplasty in Baltimore will get you more relevant results!

Popularity is useful, but not always important

Popularity is useful, but has dominated search results so heavily that it gets harder and harder to find the page you want, especially if your search is a complex one. Cuil respects popular pages and recognizes that for many simple searches, popularity is an easy answer to your question. But for a deeper search, establishing relevancy is more than a numbers game. Cuil prefers to find all the pages with your keyword or phrase and then analyze the rest of the content on those pages. During this analysis we discover that your keywords have different meanings in different contexts. Once we’ve established the context of the pages, we’re in a much better position to help you in your search. - From Cuil’s info section

And Cuil’s main idea – putting less popular sites in front of more popular ones – doesn’t really work. We don’t want to see spammy, keyword-flooded MFA (Made For Adsense) sites instead of the more popular, quality sites we’re used to finding on Google and Yahoo. As most webmasters know: a quality site tends to get more popular that a low-quality site. So popularity IS, after all, important. But let’s keep in mind that Cuil is new to this world and still unexperienced, so let’s look forward to a better version of it, soon. But until then, just stick to Google.