A couple of weeks ago, I asked some friends to check out the new search engine, Cuil, to see if this might be a viable alternative to Google.

It has potential, after all, as it has been developed by some former Google employees.

Cuil searches more pages on the Web than anyone else—three times as many as Google and ten times as many as Microsoft.

Rather than rely on superficial popularity metrics, Cuil searches for and ranks pages based on their content and relevance. When we find a page with your keywords, we stay on that page and analyze the rest of its content, its concepts, their inter-relationships and the page’s coherency.

Then we offer you helpful choices and suggestions until you find the page you want and that you know is out there.

Cuil (”knowledge”) is developed and run by folks with years of web and search engine development experience (including inside Google), and is currently privately funded. It has some great features, including Drilldown, rollover definitions, and navigation suggestions:

• Biggest Internet search engine—Cuil has indexed 120 billion Web pages, 3x more than any other search engine
• Organized results—Cuil’s magazine-style layout separates results by subject and allows further search by concept or category
• Different results—Unlike other search engines, Cuil ranks results by the content on each page, not its popularity
• Complete privacy protection—Cuil does not keep any personally identifiable information on users or their search histories

I haven’t received any feedback yet on the site (good or bad), but my own trial of the site has yielded less than spectacular results. For one thing, when I’m searching, I usually need to know what the latest news is on a topic, and Cuil has no way of sorting this info (or at least, I haven’t found it yet).

The other major problem is that the sources in search results are so obscure that I usually have to do a lot more additional research to even find out out if the source is credible for the topic I’m researching.

A third problem of slighly lesser importance I’ve encountered is that the search engine is not being picked up by any of my stats counters, so I do not know if I’m receiving any traffic from the site or not. But since I haven’t had a spike in traffic from any unknown sources, I suspect not. As a blogger, it is as important to me that a search engine drive traffic to my site as it is that I can find good information on the search engine when I need it.

So, so far, I am not as impressed with Cuil as I’d hoped. Has anyone else had a similar (or different) experience?