Cuil is the new search engine developed by ex-Google engineers and launched in the last week.  There is a lot of talk about Cuil at the moment so I thought I would give it a quick test to see how it performs.  The easiest way I can think to test it is to try some search terms for which my tech blog ranks highly.

Some time ago I wrote a post titled “Event ID 2095 and the USN Rollback Adventure“, which is one of my highest trafficked posts and ranks on Google for “Event ID 2095″ even above the Microsoft.com support article for the issue and the very popular EventID.net website.

The new Cuil search engine doesn’t rank it at all, but worse still it omits the Microsoft.com article from its first page results as well, which should be the most authoritative and relevant result (after me of course).

Another recently popular post of mine was called “Adobe Acrobat Reader 9 Silent Install” describing how to deploy the new Acrobat Reader to a network.  For both “acrobat reader 9 silent install “and “adobe acrobat reader 9 silent install” my blog ranks #1 on Google.  The post has had lots of hits and even a few hundred downloads of the file I provide to help with configuring multiple computers at once.

The new Cuil search engine again doesn’t rank my post at all, but again worse still it omits any Adobe.com results!  In fact when I searched Cuil for “adobe acrobat reader 9 silent install” it returned no results at all, not even Adobe’s product page for Acrobat Reader.

I could understand if Cuil had not indexed my blog yet, but also failing to return any Microsoft.com or Adobe.com results for these searches seems a massive problem to me.  John Chow is pretty happy already though, so maybe the Cuil engineers just tried to make the big guns happy first.  Hopefully Cuil can improve its results soon.