Posted on Tuesday, 29th July 2008 by Launching Today
Name
What do they do?
Cuil is a search engine which, according to them, index more pages in a cheaper and more efficient way than Google.
What are they like?
Cuil are obviously all or nothing here. They are a search engine with the hopes of toppling the market leader. Expensive to build and run, with a very high prize at stake. They compete with every search engine in the world.
What else should they do?
I am going to ignore the fact that they completely botched their launch day as the server couldn’t handle many search queries. The ones that worked just aren’t very good. Very competitive terms like ‘travel’ or ‘debt’ yield some very strange niche results which I wouldn’t want to be be in my first results page. It’s all good and fine if they are different, as they are here to do a better job than Google, but at this stage they are far from it. Forget about indexing more pages. Forget about the fancy marketing team. Just work on that algorithm. I keep spelling Cuil incorrectly as I write this post. You have 30 million in VC - spend a little on a phonetically better domain name. Hiring a great legal team and looking into Google’s anti-trust problems could certainly some results too.
How they can fail
Two reasons. They fail to make a better search engine or they fail to get the public’s attention that they have built a better one. Which of these it will be is the question. The founders and those who funded them know that they probably won’t do it. But as I mentioned earlier, pulling this feat off will make them one of the largest corporations in the world. As time has told us, every major company falls at some time. GM, AOL, and every search engine before Google came along. It is interesting to note that Cuil are presenting search results in a magazine style across the page, which I personally like much more than the linear result that the bigger players offer. But this is one surefire difference to what the rest are offering.
Final word
No risk no reward. So many have tried and failed miserably to take this space from Google. Maybe Cuil can be the one to do it. Even a dent in the space would be nice.
Tags: cuil, google, search
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