Cuil.com, a new search engine, has been laucnhed.  These former Google and IBM employees have setup a search engine to rival Google.

Cuil aims to intepret more of the content on the page to provide better quality results.

So far the results are not so great.

Try a few searches about topics that you know about.  See if you think the authority sites rank highly.

I read a few articles where people demonstrate that the results are poor.

http://searchengineland.com/080728-024035.php

Have you heard about Google Knol?

Knol is a rival to Wikipedia.

Google seem to be favouring knol pages in their own search results now.

Try searching for "how to backpack" in Google.  The first entry is a brand new knol page.

I think they have gone mad, and so does Aaron Wall.

Cuil have a good chance to beat Google if they list quality small sites delivering good information, rather than assuming that the big sites like IMDB, Amazon and Wikipedia have it all (and knol know I guess).