Me.dium.com has taken a different tack. We have a full web index, but we change the results based on the surfing activity of our user base (now over 2,000,000). It’s in alpha, but I’d be curious to hear your thoughts. http://me.dium.com/search

Also the layout of the results, reminds you (or in this case me), all too much of the annoying spam-websites that appear if you misspell a domain name. This might of course also be due to the fact that many of us have been using Google as the defacto standard for search engines, what they should offer, how to present this and how to “format” our search queries.

But but but, I think it is only fair, to mention the one thing I do like about the Cuil concept, or actually two things, categories and “Typing Suggestions” as they call it. Although the actual category suggestions often are bad, it in essence is a good idea, as you sometimes find yourself searching in the dark, not exactly knowing which keyword fits best for what you are looking for.

Also I find it a bit unrealistic, for a small company to compete with a giant as Google because of the need for a massive server park to keep the database up to date. So either they have to limit the amount of data they register, thus making it harder to find relevant sites, or by limiting the amount of websites they can crawl per hour, thus either reducing the amount of websites they can index or the interval in which they are updated. Both of which doesn’t go hand in hand with a “Good search engine”. For that you need a database with a huge number of websites indexed, frequent updates of these, and as much information as possible on each.