When I joined Searchme in 2006 a couple other startup search engines were making headlines. Powerset, which recently got bought by Microsoft, and Cuil, which launched today.

Cuil has been known as the startup building the huge index. I ran some pet queries and it seems like they’re pretty comprehensive, though other people have emailed me about missing results for their queries. So try it yourself. The UI is mostly text, with a couple visual elements thrown in like thumbnails next to results. For the life of me though, I can’t figure out where they got the thumbnails used for a query for Searchlounge. The text is in columns like a newspaper. They’ve implemented a query suggest tabbed feature along the top of the SERP, and an Explore by Category feature on the right (strangely several times when I clicked this I got a no result page, so must be something buggy).

I’m not going to delve into a relevance analysis, so give it a whirl yourself and see what you think. There are tons of posts already about it, but here’s Techcrunch’s: Cuil Exits Stealth Mode With A Massive Search Engine