Those of you who are tired of Google, have a brand spanking new alternative search engine to play with, called Cuil (pronounced kewl). Its designers are ex-Google employees who left the company a few years ago when they realized that Google, for all its innovation and invention, was pretty rigid in terms of how it approached its hallmark product, the search engine. Co-founder Anna Patterson told the AP Press: “Google has looked pretty much the same for 10 years now,” she said, “and I can guarantee it will look the same a year from now.”

How does Cuil look? Pretty cool. (Really, really trying hard not to overdo the puns today! Obv. not working.) The entry page is all black with a little search bar tilted just to the left of the center of the page. The results are indeed very visual. There are pictures and full paragraphs are extrapolated for a glance-through. However, as others have already noted, part of Google’s dominance is due to its been-around-the-block status. Searches get more accurate the more people use a search engine.

I took the two for a test-drive. First up, googling and cuiling (?) myself. (But, of course.)

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There are 18,332 results for me. Yay! However, the first page of results only shows a random collection of my columns from my time at the Village Voice and a few Gawker-related posts. It doesn’t show my homepage, or other, more bio-type, newsy announcements on Citysearch. Even though, I’ve only been here less than a week, Google’s got my connection to Pop + Politics on the first page, and Cuil doesn’t.

I am not sure if this is just a result of the fact that Cuil is a day old, or if it’s just broken. Time will tell.

Second attempt. I typed in “Tim Kaine gay marriage” into both search engines. I was trying to locate the news that Kaine is actually not for gay marriage at all, even though he opposed an anti-gay marriage amendment on the basis that it was too broad and could also hurt innocent, straight people. In this, Cuil was a bit more useful. There was one entry high up on the page that clearly stated his opinion, whereas I searched Google through pages and pages to weed out this basic fact.

So far, the Internets are not very impressed.

Googling is going to be a hard habit to break: I realized after after I wrote the post, that I had used Google, not Cuil, to search for news articles on the start-up. Not cuil.