You may have noticed yesterday the launch of www.cuil.com- a really beautiful search engine. It’s intuitive to use and has a bunch of handy features and did I mention that it’s a beauty? For everyday people cuil could easily replace the big G but while it is gorgeous it doesn’t have the nice crunchy features of other engines. My biggest gripe is that lack of search operators, followed a close second simply by the SERP layout.
Taking a step back from being an SEO I can see that a magazine-style SERP layout works, information is ordered nicely and its refreshing to say goodbye to the list- but being an SEO I need to see where in a list something is- quickly, with a plugin that numbers it. I also might want to check how many pages of a site are indexed with a "site:" operator, but cuil doesn’t seem to be able to let me.
Regardless of its comparative limitations it is very, very nice …as is searchme another new engine launched a little while back. searchme adds a great twist to the search engine- it has a web 2.0 (design that is) feature for creating and sharing "stacks"- or little repositories of your favourite web pages, for this reason alone it might start to gain serious popularity.
After reviewing these two newcomers Google’s searchmash (as documented here) looks a bit, well, ugly. If either cuil or searchme get their act together to offer the granularity of Google there might one day be another contender, but I fear that day will be a long time coming.
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