To give credit where Cuil is a worthy attempt to crack the stronghold that Google has on the search market. No doubt a huge amount of work has gone into its development. So rather than finding fault, perhaps it would be more constructive to ask the question: what will it take to unseat Google?

Cuil’s strategy was to set itself apart by the promoting the size of its page index and the quality of its results. Both of these are incredibly difficult terms on which to square up to Google, and with good reason. Google has been refining its system for years and it would be nigh on impossible for a start-up to beat them (even if its founders did originally work for the company!).

Google’s greatest vulnerability may prove to be one of very features that helped it to become so successful – its on-screen presentation.

One of the keys to Google’s success was that it took search from being a small feature on a busy ‘portal’ page crammed with news, images, weather forecasts and a wealth of other information. Google provided the simple white screen that we now take very much for granted. Matched to this were simple results pages, offering a simple list in plain text on a white background. It was a clean, no nonsense approach and it worked brilliantly.

But in the eight or so years since Google first reach our desktops, the capabilities of our PCs and laptops has come on in leaps and bounds. Back then, many of us had Windows 95 or 98 on our PCs. Looking back at some screenshots, they look a million miles away from the increasingly rich graphical environment offered by a Windows Vista machine. Screens are larger, brighter and more colourful. Processors are faster, graphics smoother. Web software has also got a lot smarter, with technology such as Flash allowing pages to be far richer than ever before.

Google’s technical credentials are unshakeable. Ten years of experience in indexing and rankings have left it the masters as far as the ‘back office’ of search technology is concerned. Could a simple change to the user interface be sufficient to have searchers switching their allegiances by the million?

There may be an interesting parallel in the mobile phone sector. The recent release of the iPhone has had mobile phone buyers queuing round the block. Why? Well, it certainly doesn’t contain features technology that are not readily available from other leading manufacturers. It just looks so darned sexy. That’s not to say it is a simple triumph of form over function, because it works brilliantly too.

The iPhone of search. That would really would be cool.

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