Cuil Search Engine Comes Out of the Gate Stumbling
According to cuil.com’s homepage at the time this article was written, the Cuil search engine indexes an astounding 121,617,892,992 web pages. The question is how they are indexed. Backed by big brains and bigger bucks, Cuil (pronounced “cool”) launched last night and was hardly welcomed with the parades and fanfare it was surely hoping for. In fact, we can’t recall the last time a product received this much bad press within 24 hours of its launch. Most would be overjoyed by not one, not two, but three consecutive articles on Techcrunch, not to mention the hundreds of other articles on blogs across the internet. Unfortunately it seems as though not many people had anything good to say. Search is a tricky space since Google swallowed it years ago and bloggers would typically root for the underdog as opposed to writing a young scrapper off immediately, but it might just be too hard to root for Cuil. Traffic to cuil.com may end up being the biggest bell curve we’ve ever seen. It has a great look and some interesting features but downtime, skepticism and perhaps worst of all, consistently bad search results have dug a hole that Cuil may never be able to climb out of. Come on guys; when we search “Cuil” we don’t get a single result about the site! Just about every search we ran yielded pretty terrible results, even our search for “Boy Genius Report” as seen in the image above. Well, maybe we’ll be the 121,617,892,993rd page indexed…
Tags: Cuil, google, Seach Engine, Search
“We’ll be back soon…
Due to overwhelming interest, our Cuil servers are running a bit hot right now. The search engine is momentarily unavailable as we add more capacity.
Thanks for your patience.”
If they would return some results I wouldn’t have to try again and again.
Oh wait… I’ll just stick with google… someone post when there is some positive news.
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Now the site says
We’ll be back soon…
Due to overwhelming interest, our Cuil servers are running a bit hot right now. The search engine is momentarily unavailable as we add more capacity.
Thanks for your patience.
Google must be reaching for the O2 after laughing so hard….
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I gave it a try but i think ill stick with google a bit longer, maybe is my luck but 1/2 of my searches came back with no result’s and the other 1/2 landed on stuff i haven’t looking for so they might need more time
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I checked out cuil as it is important that folks looking for our Foundation’s services are able to find us on the web.
I took the simplest routes to find our website but cuil provided no way to get there.
Here are two Comparative Searches for the ‘Jonah and the Whale Foundation’ website for you to try:
Search on ‘jtwf.org’
Search String:
http://www.cuil.com/search?q=jtwf.org
Result:
Site is not found
Search String:
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&rls=com.microsoft%3Aen-us&q=jtwf.org&btnG=Search
Result:
Site is found
search on ‘disability foundation jonah’
Search String:
http://www.cuil.com/search?q=disability%20foundation%20jonah&sl=long#
Result:
Engine states “627,780 results for disability foundation jonah” but only displays 2 results.
Search String:
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&rls=com.microsoft%3Aen-us&q=disability+foundation+Jonah&btnG=Search
Result:
Reference to the foundation is found in the third hit; a link to the website address is found in the fourth hit.
I hope the families we reach don’t start using cuil . . .
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I searched for a broad category in my industry and it found plenty of results - the problem is it put my company name and logo next to the results for almost all of my competitors!
Granted I like that my name is plastered all over their site, but at the same time I don’t want someone clicking on my logo thinking they’re coming to me then ending up at a competitors site instead.
Very disappointing!
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@Tyrone
Why? 10.6B reasons! That is Google’s cumulative earnings over its relatively short history. You can bet a few people would like a crack at that market.
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This site is stupid…even dumber are the investors. A search for 2 girls 1 cup displayed results for a stupid t-shirt and that douchebag Joe Rogan.
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Increasing: Now it is 45,759,574 results.
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I’d like to point out that one great thing about google is that if you misspell something, it gives you a suggestion. Cuil doesn’t and there are a lot of bad spellers (and typers) out there.
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