Cuil search engine

I'm a news-hungry person, particularly IT developments. So when a juicy piece of news such as a new search engine out to challenge Google for top slot hit the wires, I wanted to be one of the firsts to get to know what's all about--some april fool thingy in july?

On scanning one of my several newsfeeds I read and probed deeper if there was any story in this. There was none. Not that it is a hoax, but more like a little kid of 4 telling his dad, "I'll whip you". My hands-on test of Cuil was, of course, my name. Pooof--it turned up several Kiswahili language news items containing the word "makundi" (meaning, groups). Way down there was only one site related to the search I had submitted. There were 4 tabs. Going to second ("Next") tab, more of the irrelevant fetches, plus (Ouch! How?) the same site listed on the first tab. When I enclosed the phrase "Daniel Makundi" in inverted commas, Cuil fetched only one result. I yawned. And for change tried Google for the phrase: The entire first tab had relevant results all the way, and it took much less time compared to the younger challenger.

I'm told the effort is being funded by a consortium that have put up tens of millions of dollars. Tough luck. I don't see much future of the Cuil, apart from gratification of google-haters: and there must be mighty few of those, 'cos Google isn't just a search engine, it is a pack of handy freebies (Desktop, Picasa, Earth, Sketchup, Docs etc etc.), it's so many other things.

I don't see much improvement in the next few days, and I can see plenty of unhelpful reviews on the blogospheres and news.