The (Premature) Birth of the Cuil
Posted by Christopher on August 04, 2008 at 12:48 PM
Cuil, a brand new search engine (it just launched last Monday, and I think, given the founders' somewhat inexplicable brio, was supposed to have put Google out of business by last Thursday), has metamorphosed, in one short week, from a potential Google-killer to a spectacular failure.
By and large, the SEO/M community approached Cuil with a resounding "whatever," which has since become, in most cases, outright ridicule. For example:
The World According to Cuil - Google Blogoscoped
How Cuil Is The SEO Industry? - Search Engine Land
How To Lose Your Cuil 20 Seconds After Launch - TechCrunch
SEOs Comment On Cuil, New Google Competitor - Search Engine Roundtable
Even Yahoo, who usually picks up their own fair share of scorn, scored points on these guys with Yuil (and, seriously, you have to give them a hand for that one).
Do the folks at Cuil deserve the backlash?
Coming out of nowhere and billing itself as "the world's biggest search engine," Cuil had to know it was going to take some immediate heat from the search engine community.
Cuil, nobody cares if you have more indexed pages that anyone else (even if Google says otherwise). And whatever you're doing with your image search is ludicrous. Turn it off. Fix it. Work out the kinks. It might also help if a person could tell which result was most relevant, rather than being served up a big old jumble/grab bag.
We're all fans of the scrappy underdog. That's why we're so dismayed. We keep waiting for one to take on Google, which, while still the best search engine available, has become to many of those who make a living off the web a bloated despot. So please, take it back to your old drawing board, Cuil (provided you have enough cash, because it's maybe going to be tough to drum up a whole lot more VC after the last seven days). Whip that algorithm into shape. You needed this last week to knock that chip off your shoulder. Your mission is clear. You could be a contender.
But right now, you're just not cool.
Category
Search Engines
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Comments (7)
Posted on August 6, 2008 09:36 AM
Please, give them a space. If we don't support newborn search engines, how are we expecting a company from nowhere will launch and compete with Google. I respect and support them. Google dominance should end!
Posted on August 6, 2008 11:59 AM
It was over hyped somewhat,found 4 entries for my site.
Wow lol
Posted on August 7, 2008 06:25 AM
The results for several industries where I have SEO clients are pitiful - sites come up based on keyword stuffing techniques that are so archaic and long since dis-allowed that Cuil is laughable.
As far as MGA's request to give them space - a site should never launch if the creators have not properly performed QA. Given their claims and the market competition, QA should never have allowed the trash that comes up in results, let alone the pitiful smattering of any results at all for serious search phrases.
Posted on August 18, 2008 02:18 PM
Silly me, I thought Web 2.0 would never over take SEO and then the report that MySpace is twice as big followed by FaceBook now taking the lead.
Cuil may not have made the best debut in the world, but keep your eye on it and other merging technologies or miss out on golden opportunities.
SEOGuy
Posted on August 6, 2008 04:21 AM
Apparently Cuil was not quite ready for launch during the first day or two - many medium long tail queries did not return results at all, and even general queries returned way fewer results than they should have considering Cuil's claims of having indexed so many pages already. They did improve somewhat afterward, however, and seem to be picking up more results and increasing relevance as more people have been testing out the engine.
In the long run, I hope they get things together and perform well enough to compete with the major search engines and then maybe do some advertising. I would like to see more serious competitors to Google in order to hold their power in check and encourage more transparency overall.