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Gerrit Eicker
Cuil Hype
MacManus: “The fact is, Cuil is a very ordinary product right now”; http://is.gd/175Y
Gerrit Eicker
Cuil
http://cuil.com is an interesting new search engine, but it’s still in need for a lot of feed and love.
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Gerrit Eicker
WSJ: Former Google Engineers Launch Search Engine
TechCrunch: “The super-stealth search project was founded by highly respected search experts. Husband and wife team Tom Costello (CEO) and Anna Patterson (VP Engineering) were joined by Russell Power. Patterson and Power are also ex-Google employees, and the company has been the subject of intense speculation over the last couple of years.”
SEL: “Cuil is claiming to have the largest index of the web, 120 billion pages indexed (with a total of 186 billion seen by its crawler; spam and duplicate content are among things excluded from what gets indexed). In talking with them, Cuil estimated they were three times the size of Google. Sounds pretty awesome, right? … Cuil is making a big push that it ranks pages by content, rather than popularity. The idea here is to poke at how Google is commonly viewed to just reward pages that have the most PageRank value. … Cuil says that it’s not logging IP information or keeping any type of material that could be traced back to individual searchers. In contrast, all three major search engines do log IPs addresses plus cookie searches and, in the case of Google, even allow searchers to store search history over time.”
NYT: “‘This is the most promising thing I’ve seen in a while,’ said Danny Sullivan, who has followed the online search business for more than a decade and is the editor of Search Engine Land. ‘Whether they are going to threaten Microsoft, much less Google, that’s another story.‘”
SEJ: “The question now is, can Cuil match up against Google? Personally, I don’t think so. And here are five simple reasons why: 1. The black, white and blue mixture of color doesn’t emit an ‘X’ factor. It’s bland, its boring and it simply doesn’t have the ‘IT’ factor. 2. The 3 column layout won’t just cut it, even if you reset it into a 2 column layout. Users are so used to the usual one column layout of SERPs, plain and simple. 3. The search refinements/suggestions through ‘explore by category’ tag is confusing. Search engine experts can immediately grasp it, but not the common folks, who use search engines to find information fast, users who are so used to be given with just links and who quickly click on links that they deemed useful. 4. The synopsis doesn’t do anything as well. It just adds to the weight of Cuil’s search results page. Nobody would read those texts, users will click on the first sign of an anchor link. 5. Cuil (pronounced as cool) doesn’t sound cool as a name for a search engine who wants to beat the crap out of Google.”
TechCrunch: “The story quickly turned from Google-killer to Google’s lunch (make that an amuse bouche). The results Cuil returns aren’t particularly great, and sometimes completely off the mark.”