If results are poorly presented and cluttered, or if there are too many superfluous images, we cannot easily find what we need. This is a lost opportunity for Cuil. One’s eyes jump around the page. I felt a “confusion” – Do I scan down or to the right? You stated it well!

I admit that I’m sticking with Google, too.

Thanks for the tip on the PicLens FireFox plugin! And thanks for such a fantastic analysis!

Without anymore input from me than what I introduced in the search box, Google has, definitely won in terms of relevancy. Cuil, is by far the worst of the three. Than we have Yahoo with it’s suggestions. I loved them. I has been a long time since I used Yahoo for searching… The interface has improved, yet it needs something more. As does Cuil.

Cuil is great if you’re searching for passing time. It is like reading a magazine (without your glasses). Assuming the relevance of the results is the same, I had the most trouble finding out wich result I wanted in cuil. It may be from me, but the pictures, all they did, was distract me. Cuil snippets could be good because they show one full sentence or paragraph to contextualize what I’m reading, yet it’s only one snippet. And when I’m searching I don’t want to spend a lot of time reading through a lot of text. I read something, a litle bit more and decide if it’s a good result or not. A full paragraph doesn’t do me any good at all for that. Cuil also has a presentational problem: it’s letters are to condensed and not large enough. It doesn’t facilitate reading or skimming through the results.

This letter-spacing problem is also an issue for yahoo. But since they don’t present a lot of text is easier to read. The font is larger also. Its searches would benefit with the “related” google feature. Sometimes I don’t know or can’t express what I’m searching for in words so I go by approximation. Search something, see a result I like, though it’s not yet what I need and click on related results to see if there’s anything more related to what I want.

Google has it’s own issues to, but not only it does give me more relevant results it also has more easier to read interface (with yahoo close by). Yep, I’m still sticking with Google for now.

Oh, and I’m sticking with Google for other reasons as well, not only the search relevancy or the interface appearance. Google, as a lot of services that go along side with their search results: results within the same website are grouped together, restrict results to my language or my country is one click away, related searches, image search (with the piclens plugin it’s awesome), news and group searches… etc.