A new search engine launched today aims to play David to Google’s Goliath… but shows up without a slingshot. Cuil.com (supposedly pronounced “cool” for a Gaelic word for “knowledge” but which others contend is derived from Irish hero Fionn mac Cumhaill) pumped out some major PR this weekend, getting impressive media coverage on Monday which lead to an apparent flood of curious visitors– who just as quickly dried up.
In my view Cuil has three major strikes against it from the start: a terrible name, a disastrous launch and a clearly outdated indexing model.
First off, using a cutesy homophone with non-standard spelling means potential users will have difficulty finding the site or remembering it, right off the bat. Some commentators have even noticed that a slight typo turns it into the the Spanish and Italian slang for a certain body part — the domains for which point to porn sites. A far better name would have been “cull.com” — which, although it may still be similar to a particular body part at least means something relevant to search engines.
Server issues at launch were likewise Cuil’s own making. Had its ex-Google engineers rolled the site out in stages (ala the various ‘beta’ Google products), to meet potential demand, it would have garnered a better reaction. Instead, due to so much media attention on its first day, potential users are getting “no results because of high load.” That doesn’t make me particularly enthused to go back. If they can’t manage the server requirements or forecast the load of casual bleeding-edge users checking out the site on a first day, how can they plan for the constant mainstream usage?
The strike-out is Cuil’s falsely claimed “world’s biggest search engine” — a boast so blatantly inaccurate, many reviewers are already taking the site to task for its obvious indexing shortcomings. Cuil’s info page lays it on thick: “Cuil searches more pages on the Web than anyone else—three times as many as Google and ten times as many as Microsoft.” Its goal is nothing less than “solving the two great problems of search” indexing the entire Internet and making pages relevant to users. In my own search tests, it fails miserably on both accounts: many of the sites I pulled up a limited selection of pages, usually outdated– some from months ago– in seemingly random order of usefulness. Amusingly, a search for “cuil” fails to pull up their own site!
In short, Cuil is clue-less.
See:
- Silicon Alley Insider: Google-Wannabe Cuil: Worst. Launch. Ever.
- TIME.com: Why Cuil Is No Threat to Google
