HN had a posting about "postmodern programming" a couple of days back, so I thought I would give it a try. Google found at least 10 pages of documents, Yahoo a bunch, even answers.com found a couple. Cuil? Zip, Nada, zero. I guess I won't switch.
EDIT: My bad. Apologies to Cuil and HN. I had a typo in my query. Cuil didn't catch it, but Google suggested the correct spelling when I gave it the typo.
Live.com can hardly get any traffic and their search works. I had high hopes for Cuil but gave up when it became clear that their search results were simply bad or missing. They should have held a closed beta for 6 months.
Plus they must get a decent amount of traffic from mistyped URLs in IE - I've ended up at live.com a couple of times while trying to test some XHTML/CSS/JS in IE.
I suppose each user has his own preferred torture-test search terms. For mine, Cuil has recently (but NOT at launch) returned a better set of results that does Live.com. But neither wows me enough to pull me away from Google.
EDIT: My bad. Apologies to Cuil and HN. I had a typo in my query. Cuil didn't catch it, but Google suggested the correct spelling when I gave it the typo.