Google-Wannabe Cuil: Worst. Launch. Ever.
And we wanted to like Cuil's story: In recent weeks Google (GOOG) has been gunning for everyone from Wikipedia to Second Life. We liked the idea of a newer, hungrier search engine founded by ex-Google employees that would bring some competition back into a monopolizing search market.
If only Cuil's product worked as well as it its marketing. So what's un-cool about Cuil?
1. The service was down intermittently throughout its launch day
We heard the hype that Cuil indexed far more webpages than Google, but for lots of users their first impression of the new service was either this at cuil.com's start page:
or this for search results:
2. Assuming Cuil worked at all, the search results were widely reported as inaccurate
What's the first thing people check in a new, more-powerful Internet search? Their own name, of course. The SAI staff ran our own names through Cuil's search. It hadn't heard of some of us, while for others it returned our bylines next to pictures of... other people.
SAI's commenters noted that searches for terms like "penguins" or "failure" returned zero results.
3. The name "Cuil": We can't pronounce it, we can't spell it, and we don't know how to use it in a sentence
Are we supposed to pronounce "Cuil" like "cool," or the cutesey AOL-turned-MySpace-speak "kewl"? We're already used to "googling it." Are we supposed to "cuil it" instead? We've seen commenters already misspell Cuil in writing about it, a serious problem when trying to bring people to a site. Especially if you don't own common misspellings of your own domain: As CrunchGear notes, culi.com leads to an Italian porn outfit.
Earlier: Would-Be Google-Killer Cuil Stumbles Out Of The Gate; Long-Term Looks Grim, Too
"Robert" received ZERO results.
But a search for myself "Firstname Lastname" (and I have a quite common name) had ME show up on the first page. It was my LinkedIn profile.
Also, the categories in the infobox were cool, but limited in scope in terms of subcategories. And the main categories were not hyperlinked. And clickeing on the subcategories always resulted in ZERO results.
Hopefully they'll get the bugs out... it'll be nice to see some REAL option to The Googlepire.
Branding problem #1: Ambiguity about your product name.
Uhhhh are you saying you pronounce "cool" differently than "kewl"? If so, please post a sound clip... this I gotta hear.
I mean if you're going to talk about the same things....might as well be a little quicker right?
Sylvan, why on earth would Google buy this? There are lots of search engines out there, some of which have genuinely valuable approaches that could complement Google's offering. Cuil hasn't shown anything of interest so far, in my opinion.
Dave said:
Sylvan, why on earth would Google buy this? There are lots of search engines out there, some of which have genuinely valuable approaches that could complement Google's offering. Cuil hasn't shown anything of interest so far, in my opinion.
Agreed, Cuil is unimpressive and why anyone would buy it out is beyond me. I know, people hate google. If only because of the privacy issue (not a problem with me), and because its no underdog. That being said there are other options that actually work. Namely MSN (probably not a great choice for those who don't like big companies), Yahoo, and Ask.
Cuil couldn't even take on Ask if they wanted to, let alone Google. It wouldn't be so bad if they hadn't built up the hype for their search engine. Yet they did, not to mention they don't even have the basics that most search engines have (After all the goal is to make cuil your home page right?). Where is the tabs that include news, image search, video search, maps, shopping etc? These again are just the basics, most of which I wouldn't dare live without (Why the hell should I go to another site if I can have it all at my finger-tips?).
The least they could do is impress me with search, since its the only thing I'm limited to. Nope, I also had a disappointing experience in finding stuff. Oh, by the way, if you hate Google so much don't use it for crying out loud you bunch of cry babies.
If you haven't cashed out in such a fashion yourself post an apology here after the news hits.
It's easy to criticize others when you've never had the fortitude/determination to venture out on your own.
Yahoo/MSFT will pay for the talent in addition to the unproven technology.
Toodles!
Cuil has the ingredients to actually compete with Google and they've ruined it with a premature launch. I'll keep it bookmarked and continue to play around with it for a while, but just considering they didn't anticipate the server load is a deal breaker.
Maybe you thought that you are the only people in the world with your particular name(s)? are you so self possessed?
And all this talk of how many sites are indexed is at the end of the day worthless. Most people go beyond the first couple of pages of search results anyway. Its not the number of pages which are indexed it the quality of the pages that are indexed which count.
Jason
James
With the attention they got yesterday on all the media, including tv and night time news, there's no doubt their PR team and whoever is on the board has pretty amazing contacts.
It'd be cool if they wouldn't be in this for a buy out, unless it's a major buy out, Google needs the competition, they're not there yet.
I tried using the engine 100% yesterday, but I felt choked, like missing air, its amazing how good google is. My work became increasingly hard when I couldn't find references to the things I needed while coding, google is so good some of us probably take it for granted, switch engine for a day and you'll see, it's hard to switch.
I search for my name first and recieve a hodge podge of mostly irrelevent results and spam. Google usually has 5-7 pages of good results before getting into the worthless ones. But the one that basically told me this site will be gone by the end of summer (and not becuase they were bought) was i searched for my business in "Cuil." We have two locations and numereous awards and artcle write ups, Google comes back with over 40,000 response (mostly relevent) but Cuil said "no matches found." NO MATCHES FOUND!
Forget this site
FAIL
I sincerely doubt that cuil is a real contender against Google.
Then, when reality sets in and they're revealed to be useless and impotent, they tuck their tail between their legs and limp back to their mother.
So long, Cuil, we hardly knew ye... mostly because you were all publicity and no substance.
For some reason, "cuil" looked familiar to me, so I looked it up. The word "cúil" is Irish for "rear" or "back", as in "doras cúil"--"back door". It's pronounced (very roughly) something like "coo-il", emphasis on the "coo-".
http://www.cbcjobs.com
Accurate descriptions next to someone else's pictures, with links to our site.
Our pictures next to competitors sites linking to competitors site.
What a joke. A miserable useless failure in my mind and it looks like they crawled all the B S sites as well. Loaded with junk and irrelevancy.
I was going to call them but it looks like the press is already pointing out the flaws.
When is the funeral ?
:)
Toodles!
WTF? Are you an asshole?
Second, this is a typical engineering driven product. The big feature is that it can index pages for much cheaper. But in getting all excited about the indexing, they forgot to focus on search quality. Essentially hoping at some point Google would buy them to help reduce their own indexing costs. But no user gives a crap how much it costs you to index the damn thing, or how much of the web you index! Users just want good search results fast. Cheap indexing leads to long term competitive advantage. By focusing on that at the expense of quality, they are DOA, and eventually won't be able to generate enough traffic for a big exit,up will run out of cash, and Google can then snatch their fancy schmancy index IP at the garage sale.
http://businessmindhacks.com/post/cuil-knol-and-other-crimes-against-branding
@ian : the french word for leather is "cuire" and is pronounced more like "queer" than "kweel"
I happen to be Irish and cuil does not mean rear or back. It does in fact mean knowledge in the english language.
Cuil is indeed pronounced as if saying 'cool'. Heavy pronunciation and elongation of the 'u', the 'i' and 'l' are soft. There is more of a pronunciation of the 'l' than the 'i'.
It does depend on who taught you Irish as there can be a slight variation in pronunciation depending on the gaeltacht area your teachers came from.
"open source" mpeg4ip streaming
Here's what happened:
* Cuil says there are three results (vs. google's 40,000), but it only shows one and there doesn't seem to be any way to view the other two.
* The one-and-only displayed result is not sourceforge!
* The image displayed for the result is irrelevant and I have no clue where it came from because it doesn't link to its source.
* The srp layout is totally hosed until I manually resize the window.
* The w3c html validator lists 27 errors.
AWESOME!!!
good job!
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