It is up over here...and so far it is not bad. It has gotten better throughout the morning/ afternoon.
Cuil is an interesting entry into this space, but so was recent newcomers, Hakia, Mahalo, Search Wikia, Gigaweb and Exaleed and noone of them made a dent. I work in this industry and have several unknown contenders myself. Please check one of them out http://fabzy.com and give me feedback (good or bad). I have 6 more running on the same platform with a different look and feel. Needless to say, if i could get a third of the money they secured as backing, i would be doing well. Mine are profitable, they may never be able to say that. I wish them well, competition is a good thing.
A search result from www.cuil.com: No results because of high load... Due to excessive load, our servers didn't return results. Please try your search again. Make your own conclusion.
They seem to be hung-up on the fact that Google keeps some user data (such as what they search for). To me that is a small price to pay for relevant search results. Doing a simple search using Cuil - I can't figure out where the results come from, because they don't seem to come from my query.
somehow i knew you were going to say that actually we prefer to be family safe, but it's easier said than done, without causing other troubles ... we make no attempt to monetize those kinds of searches and even turn down deals offered in that vertical