Well since every writer and blogger in North America is writing about it, I might as well jump in and compile a few thoughts on this timely topic.
How Cuil isn’t so hot.
A few former Google employees decide to challenge the king and create a search engine of their own. Days leading up to its launch, the marketing guys at Cuil (pronounced “cool” if you can believe it) go full throttle, plugging their stories to every major media outlet. The $33 million investment state that they’ve indexed, or in order words, complied into their servers, more webpages than Google.
So here’s where they fail.
First, the order of the results are based on the amount of the site’s content, not the traffic. It’s great in theory, but the results so far have been extremely random. One blogger claims that the site didn’t index sites created in late May 2007 to June 2007, creating a gap in results.
Next, the images that populate next to each finding are so random and often have nothing to do with the results (I wonder how many times I can type the word results in this post).
Lastly, the name. As pointed out by commenters over at TechCrunch, there’s a reason why “cuil” doesn’t yield any results. Apparently, they’ve changed their name from Cuill to Cuil recently, after they’ve indexed their own pages. If you try searching Cuill, you’ll see the pages and the old URL’s.
You can say their initial launch, which ended with an almost instant server crash, could be foreshadowing their future but I remain hopeful they’ll straighten things out. The interface is interesting and I like the idea of competition amoung companies (ahem), but if you’re going to blow smoke, you better make sure there’s a fire. Because when you’re dealing with the Interwebs, startups can fly or flop in a day.
Also, the title of this post is a reference to an awesome internet video.
