The tech industry is all a-buzz today with the release of Cuil (pronounced “cool”), a new search engine developed by a team of former Google engineers. Cuil promises to be more expansive than Google and return better results to searchers, but only time will tell if searchers jump off the Google train and take up Cuil.

My personal first impressions:

Cuil returns results in a “magazine” style, with a headline, 8-10 lines of copy, the site link, and sometimes an accompanying image. You can choose a 2 column or 3 column layout, but there’s no option for single column. Personally, I think a single column view would help heavy Google users (yours’ truly included) make the switch to Cuil. There’s something suddenly disconcerting about being faced with the question “Do I scan left to right, or top to bottom”? Maybe I’m being picky, but we’re talking first impressions. I’m also left-handed and scan magazines from the back cover to the front, which may attribute to my level of discomfort with this layout.

I searched a few different terms, one of which is a personal favorite – “buy handmade pottery”. I waited quite some time for my search results to be returned to me. I’ll give them the benefit of the doubt and say it’s still early in their game and the kinks are getting worked out. As far as the validity of the results, page one looked pretty spot-on. Page 2, however, had 8 (out of 9) listings from the same website – few of which actually had anything to do with pottery, and all of which directed me to an error page on that site. I would tell you about page 3 results, but I got tired of waiting for them.

So, if we’re judging based on first impressions, I would say Cuil is not ready to take on Google, but should be revisited in a few months to see if any improvements have been made. But don’t just take my word for it, feel free to check it out yourself.