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" A new search engine launched yesterday, claiming to be the next, best alternative to Google. Cuil (pronounced &amp;quot;cool&amp;quot;) garnered a ton of buzz around the Web and from mainstream media, in part because some of its founders jumped ship from Google and in part because Cuil claims (and Google disputes) that it&amp;#039;s the world&amp;#039;s biggest search engine. But if you&amp;#039;ve spent any time on the site--and we&amp;#039;ve spent a lot--you probably noticed that it&amp;#039;s certainly not the most effective one. Google the word &amp;quot;cuil,&amp;quot; and your top result comes back, predictably, as a link to cuil.com, followed by more than 1000 news stories published about the search engine&amp;#039;s debut. (They&amp;#039;re all accessible from Google News, but stories from sites like Yahoo News and TechCrunch had already made it to the front page of Google&amp;#039;s Web results page). If you Cuil the word &amp;quot;cuil,&amp;quot; on the other hand, the new engine barely returns your results in English. No news stories or blog stories will popThe New York Times. The search doesn&amp;#039;t even lead to the site&amp;#039;s own &amp;quot;About Cuil&amp;quot; part of the Web site. Cuil&amp;#039;s &amp;quot;Explore by Category&amp;quot; section recommends related searches that include &amp;quot;towns and villages in Sligo&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;French cuisine.&amp;quot; Given the number of reporters who were almost certain to try this search, you think the company would have at least jerry-rigged its algorithm to solve this problem. Pictures are another problem. In the search results for Battlestar Galactica, a write-up on Wikipedia of an episode from the 1978 show was displayed with an image from the current series. That&amp;#039;s an understandable mistake, perhaps, but other searches came up with equally irrelevant images. We Cuiled Pentax&amp;#039;s relatively new camera, the W60. Of the 10 pictures that appeared alongside the search results, only one was of the W60. A Google Image search for the same term turned up nine correct images out of its first 10 results. Inconsistency was one of the most bizarre elements of the Cuil search. Though the vast majority of images were not of the W60, most were at least of Pentax cameras. We did the search again. Funny: This time, only three pictures showed up. Two subsequent searches for the same term turned up differently, with different numbers of pictures. One had five pictures. The next had nine. There&amp;#039;s nothing wrong with a search engine changing its results. After all, the Internet is always changing, so sites like Google continually update their results. But three times in a 60-second period doesn&amp;#039;t show that the engine is constantly crawling the Web so much as that it&amp;#039;s unreliable, at least when it comes to pictures.     RELATED STORIES * PLUS: How Social Networking Could Kill Web Search as We Know It  * Q&amp;amp;amp;A: 20 (Rare) Questions for Google Search Guru Udi Manber  * ANALYSIS: The Microhoo That Would&amp;#039;ve Been  * EARLIER: How Google Forced Microsoft to Bid on Yahoo!   Perhaps it&amp;#039;s not fair to compare Cuil to Google. Maybe it&amp;#039;s better to ask if it would be useful as a secondary or even tertiary search engine. After all, Cuil has the advantage of not collecting any information about you, unlike sites like Google and Yahoo. As Information Week points out, Cuil isn&amp;#039;t the only site to offer this kind of privacy: Metasearch site ixquick is also in that business, but it&amp;#039;s an attractive feature nonetheless. With this in mind, we ran searches on ixquick, ask.com and Yahoo as well as Google and compared them to Cuil. In general, the four older sites retrieved useful information where Cuil found no results at all: In a search for sets of lyrics from the 2007 New Pornographers album, Challengers, for example, ixquick, Ask, Yahoo and Google could all tell us what song we were hunting for with just four or five words from lyrics in quotes, while Cuil came up with no results. All the established search engines found reviews as well as foreign and domestic book shops when we searched for the new novel Twenty Fragments of a Ravenous Youth. Again, Cuil came up with no results at all. Finally, we searched for the headline &amp;quot;Install Your Own Underground Sprinkler System,&amp;quot; looking for an article that PM published in 2006. This time, we didn&amp;#039;t use quotation marks. The article was the top hit on every search engine except Cuil, which couldn&amp;#039;t find the phrase at all. When we changed the wording to Underground Sprinkler System Popular Mechanics, Cuil was able to find the article--its third result had the exact headline in it that the site couldn&amp;#039;t find just moments earlier. That Cuil has trouble with multiple-word searches is an understatement. So what is this new search engine good at? Well, it came up with a lot of results for the word &amp;quot;Tolkien,&amp;quot; and all the pictures and &amp;quot;Explore by Category&amp;quot; recommendations seemed to be relevant there. But push it a little further, and the engine sputters--it&amp;#039;s hard to see why anyone would use it as a backup engine, never mind as a primary one. Of course, Cuil is only two days old. It wouldn&amp;#039;t be fair to talk about how its servers were overloaded yesterday (we got several error messages then that didn&amp;#039;t show up today) or slow. But since Cuil does claim to go deeper into the pages that it indexes than its competitors, we were surprised at how poorly it performed with phrases that are found within a page&amp;#039;s content, not its headline. Cuil might counter that it specializes in search keywords, not phrases. But Google&amp;#039;s popularity comes not just from its ability to turn up useful results when you enter &amp;quot;French Revolution,&amp;quot; but from its dominance with obscure words like your blind date&amp;#039;s name. Our first Cuil search wasn&amp;#039;t for the word &amp;quot;cuil.&amp;quot; It was for our byline (in quotations). No results. How could we possibly recommend this search engine?  RELATED STORIES * PLUS: How Social Networking Could Kill Web Search as We Know It  * Q&amp;amp;amp;A: 20 (Rare) Questions for Google Search Guru Udi Manber  * ANALYSIS: The Microhoo That Would&amp;#039;ve Been  * EARLIER: How Google Forced Microsoft to Bid on Yahoo!   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<http://www.popularmechanics.com/technology/gadgets/a12473/4275622/>