Dude, just cuil it.

cuil.com

A valid Google competitor?

Initial review:

It looks nice, it loads fast- it sucks as a search engine. I did a couple really common searches- "dog photos", "halo reviews", etc. I got a couple hits, and it does have a nice layout. I'm not used to it, so of course it's a little weird.

But, while doing these common searches, I ran into problems. One of Cuil's major advertising points is how many websites it searches, so technically it should come up with more hits for most commonly searched stuff? Well, I guess not. Because searches like "all ur base", "stuff on my cat", any huge internet meme... come up with no results. None. Nada. Nothing.

I figure, if I search for shit that is literally all over the internet in insanely annoying quantities, it'll give me a good idea at how good this site is at finding shit I actually want to find.

And Cuil? Says that in these 120 million websites claimed to be indexed, there are no phrases, websites, photos, anything oriented around dumb shit like all ur base. And now, Cuil's database appears to be unavailable.

Okay okay, granted- it's launch day of a brand new website... but they want to compete with google. Have they SEEN what happens to people who compete with google? Of course not, because you can't fucking compete with google. You can't show up on launch day not being able to find "Icanhascheezburger.com" or whatever. 

They also don't have an image search. Or maps, or any of that. I'm sorry, but in my personal opinion they probably should have developed a little bit more before they launched this. Google could afford to start purely as a website search and evolve because it was one of the first effective search engines, there was no one else out there doing the same thing, or at least not doing it nearly as well. This new website is trying to break into a market completely dominated by huge, powerful and good website. They need to prove that google isn't actually good at what it does, and they need to prove it while people are still paying attention. Which isn't looking likely.

I usually hate people for dismissing new programs or websites within hours of their creation, but for something like this I really do think it's imperative you have an outstanding first impression. They didn't even have a good introduction! There was no press, there was no advertising anywhere, and all in all it's a fairly unimpressive site. Not that at this point in time you can actually look at it- the server is down.

Awesome guys, awesome. 

ETA:

So, upon further testing, cuil.com does in fact come up with all these common internet memes... but you have to spell it exactly right. Which is sort of annoying, but understandable. Also, you'll notice that the images next to the results frequently have nothing at all to do with the results they're set next to. Which, while often hilarious, is kind of... pointless. And annoying.

Also, it comes up with LOADS of duplicate websites. There appears to be no filter on repetition. Also, their next button fails a lot.

Nitpick, nitpick.