Cuil was released yesterday and has had a great deal of coverage already. Most of the coverage has been about its index size (121 billion) in comparison to Google's (40 billion) as well as its search results in comparison to Google's. So I'm sure most of you, like myself, aren't interested in reading anymore comparisons between Cuil and Google in terms of index size and search results; TechCrunch has a great post if you want to catch up on those findings. I'm here to offer a comparison in layouts. These are a few things I found interesting when checking out Cuil:

• Google at Night - Cuil took the simplicity and elegance of the Google homepage and turned out the lights. The Cuil homepage is very similar to the Google homepage in that it has simply their logo and a search bar with a few other text snippets below. Behind these items lies a pure black canvas. This decision keeps what everyone loves about the Google homepage: it's right to the point design, but they still made it their own.
• May I Suggest? - The Google suggest feature is one that I have come to love. It saves time and helps when looking for the search string that will retrieve the results I am looking for. Cuil not only uses a similar feature in the search bar, it creates one click suggestions in a toolbar directly below the search bar. Cuil has taken a great feature and expanded it. One click recommendations is a pretty cool idea and can be very useful if the recommendations are relevant.
• Columns of Results - One of the more drastic changes to typical search results are the columns of results. When the search results are loaded, they are printed in the color scheme we have all come to expect from a search result, a blue title, a black description, and a green link. Among this commonality, Cuil displays the results in two or three columns (it appears to be three by default). This stands in contrast to the typical 10 rows of results printed by Google and countless other search engines. I believe this is a good idea. We'll have to see how it plays out, but I like the change. I am able to view almost all of the results on one screen. I barely have to scroll. I wish that the results were lined up in a more linear pattern from left to right in order for easier skimming however. I may get used to it quickly though.
• Categories of Information - Cuil has a feature on the top right of the search results page that is an "Explore by Category" box. The categories are intended to be relevant to the keyword(s) searched and then allow you to drill down into other keywords within that category. Once you click on a keyword within a category, that keyword gets added to the end of your string. For instance, searching for "webmasters" will display a category of "Search Engine Optimization." Clicking on the suggested keyword "PageRank" within that category will now make your search be "webmasters PageRank". I believe this is intended to work like a drill down function, where each additional click of a keyword narrows your results to a more fine grained result set. Some of my tests provided relevant results as I drilled down, but others didn't.
• Picture This - By default, Cuil results show a picture next to some of the results. This feature works a lot like the pictures displayed with a Google News item. Of the test keywords I searched, a very large percentage of results had a picture next to it. The relevance of the picture was not as high a percentage however. A lot of the pictures that were displayed didn't have much to do with the result. Some were totally irrelevant, and others were hanging on by a thread. This feature will get better in time and will be a nice change to the all text results. Showing image and text results on the same page could be nice in some cases. For instance if I was looking for a specific model laptop, it would be nice to see the picture next to the result.
• My Preference - The ability to customize the results is very limited. In fact, there are only three options that I can find currently; they are the number of columns to display, whether or not to use suggestions, and a safe search filtering feature. This is most likely because it is still very early in the release. I hope that there are more options in the future for advanced search features and the number of results displayed. Although I like being able to see almost all 10 of the results without scrolling, I would prefer to scroll through 10 screens to see one hundred results, rather than click the next results button ten times. I am guessing I'm not alone in that.

Overall I like Cuil. I think it has some great potential and could be very useful. I like some of the new layout changes, and I hope that the results and relevancy can improve rapidly so I can continue using it productively.

I have been designing and programming on the web for many years and still have so much more to learn. I hope to use what I have learned from my MBA to mix business with web technologies in future endeavors.