After trying it a bit, I must admit my initial enthusiasm is short-lived. I don't like to see pages and pages of items. In Newegg, for example, I always change the default to 100 items per page, then I work my scroll wheel on my mouse. With cuil, 9 items per page when there are 75million hits don't cut it.
I might feel differently if the 9 were good hits, but they are not.
Enter: XP heat shutdown
and you get items from smartmoney on heat and survival in the backwoods and 2 items on Win98 with one about
instalar e fazer disco de but!
Enter: XP heat shutdown unexpected
and you get 1 hit! (66.9K with Google, 973 in Ask, 90.5K in Yahoo!)
With all the fanfare that went into this launch, it fizzling out from the start probably killed it, as many will not give it a second thought, even if it regroups.
One idea I like is how it sorts finding by subgroups, then adds tabs to your results page for each sort. Neat idea, but it needs work.
A surprise was when I started to enter: tire reviews.... and it suggested
Tire Reviews & Ratings and when I clicked on that, it reported no results found.
Taking out the ampersand and I got 53K hits.