There’s a post up on Techcrunch about Cuil, a new search engine that’s just launched.

It has the quote below in it

We’ve been testing the engine for the last hour. Based on our test queries Cuil is an excellent search engine, particularly since it is all of an hour old. But it doesn’t appear to have the depth of results that Google has, despite their claims. And the results are not nearly as relevant.

And I seem to have missed something, how can a search engine where the results aren’t very relevant, and aren’t very deep, be “excellent”, as Techcrunch put it?

What else is there to a search engine?

Anyway, despite the $33 million in VC funding Cuil received, they don’t seem to have spent much on usability studies of search engines, or they’d know that if someone types in a domain name into the search box, you should give them that domain first in the results. Lots and lots of people use the search box as if it was the address bar in their browser, they type in “microsoft.com” and expect it to be the first result, not off the first page.

But, like Techcrunch says, it’s only been live a few hours, so hopefully they will be able to rapidly improve things.

In the mean time, I think Google, Yahoo, Live, Altavista, and Ask.com will all do a good enough job.