Ennui Blog

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The media was filled positive PR about a new search engine that is seeking to challenge Google called, Cuil (pronounced ‘cool’).

As a search professional, I’m not impressed.

In fact, the only thing that impressed me was their PR campaign. They managed to get into every major media outlet in the world. They were even featured on the front page of Drudgereport as well as Digg and all the other major social networking websites.

While their PR campaign was impressive, it was also their own undoing. Their new site could not handle the server load and it did not work for most of the day. Way to impress us guys.

What kind of company announces their ‘Google Killer’ to the world and doesn’t plan for the inevitable traffic from people wanting to try it out?

Well, eventually I was able to try it out and I was not impressed at all. The search results weren’t very relevant. I couldn’t even find some of my own websites. Hell, if you search for ‘Cuil,’ it returns nothing.

The layout of the search results also doesn’t really work from a perspective of trying to find what you’re looking for quickly. They claim they’ve indexed 192 billion webpages. But that is irrelevant unless they have the relevancy to match.

I also fail to see a business model, I don’t see ads anywhere or any way to monetize their search results. I’m glad to see someone step up and take on Google but these guys have a lot more work ahead of them before they can truly compete.