Cuil is not Cool

July 28, 2008

So, to much fanfare, $30 million dollars in venture capital funds, multiple TechCrunch stalkerage, and even CNN frontpage coverage, a former Google exec’s secret product was officially unveiled today.

Pronounced like the world ‘cool’, cuil.com is touting itself as a better search engine, proclaiming to have indexed more than 4x’s the number of sites than Google.

Being the intrepid, young ‘all things tech’ afficiando that I am, I decided to look up some terms:

ybpguide
black web 2.0
jack and jill politics
clutch mag online
electronic village

To my surprise, I got zero results.

My natural inclination was to be upset. ‘Have they forgotten about us?’ ‘Do we not exist?’

But some digging by the Black Web 2.0 crew found that we weren’t alone. A well-known tech evangelist, Chris Brogan, couldn’t find anything on himself, either.

C’est la vie. I guess I shouldn’t be TOO surprised. Early-adopters usually get the shaft in some kind of way. I just wasn’t expecting that “the best, next search-engine” would….well, not have results.

Category: Trends, web 2.0 | Tags: chris brogan, cuil, google, hype, search engines, techcrunch, ybpguide

Adam

Disappointing. Many broken links on page 1 - looks like their not spidering nearly fast enough.

kingdo

cuil ???

Onur Caglayan

I found this article in cuil search engine at first ranks. No comment more.

Gari

Dunno where you were looking matey.

I just read you posting and searched cuil.com for digital cameras.

Return was: 307,517,503 results for digital camerasWeb|Video

Gari

Ray A.

The lesson to be learned from this is to always underpromise and overdeliver. If they had snuck up on the world like google themselves did, they would have had the time to get their stuff together before everyone in the world hit the site, looking for the next best thing. Now it will be difficult if not impossible to relaunch.

Mario Armstrong

Well at least Cuil didnt do what Microsoft did and hire an ad-agency to develop MSDewey.com - a search engine with a touch of humor that plays prerecorded movie clips of a female actress to entertain you while searches are being performed. This was an adobe flash based experiment for Live Search. Check out - www.msdewey.com/ - you'll be cracking up :-)

Lynne d Johnson

I just did a search for my name and all of the content is related to me, and some even from my site, in fact the first result is my site: "http://www.cuil.com/search?q=Lynne+d+Johnson" Also just looked for Chris Brogan and do see the issue "http://www.cuil.com/search?q=chris%20brogan&sl;=long" his own site does not appear in the first page results. Not even when I typed his name altogether "http://www.cuil.com/search?q=chrisbrogan&sl;=long". Interesting results indeed. I did just look at Brogan's meta tags and his name doesn't appear in either the description or keywords tag. This could be the reason. Why his site comes up first in Google, is because he's the popular link for the name Chris Brogan. But since I haven't read the science behind Cuil I can not make a full assessment.

More to come...

urbantech

They need to do some work to those algorithms for sure, and add some more servers, thats just brainpower, IP, & hardware. The have raised a nice amount of capital, and have done this type of start up before, and Google bought that company might I add. Give them the benefit of the doubt for being bold, and ambitous enough to go after the crown. Competition is healthy for consumers, and good for the economy.

blackweb20

I agree Tiffany. The problem then becomes how to change they way a mass amount of people search. Everyone has been programed to search using keywords, even if they don't even know that is what they are doing.

tiffany

that may be their gimmick, but the problem is that we all know how to do a keyword search. the fact that it returned such awful results for keyword searches makes me question the site's worth.