There has already been tons of posts about new search engine Cuil.com all over the web. When you see 5+ pages of discussion on any topic on Webmasterworld, you know people are taking notice. So from what i have read on Webmasterworld.com, lot of reviews are negative and people are comparing it to Google’s product offerings. Which i don’ think is fair. Google was not perfect from day one. Cuil results are respectable and new format is something to talk about. Yes of course people are not going to like it because everyone’s used to 10 blue links. But i think the way results are presented it is neat and my favorite part is “Explore By Category” and tab searches.
However, i do not wish to talk about Cuil. What i do wish to talk about is, why is Cuil getting all the attention. Numerous engines have come in the past, called “Google Killers” in the past, but of course none of them have survived or at least no one remembers them. So why is Cuil getting all the media love or in other words, why has Cuil been able to generate buzz? I can go back to one of my favorite books “Made to Stick” and get some concepts from them, but below are some of my thoughts:
1) It is launched by former Google employees
2) It’s index is 3 times larger than Google’s (From Marketing class in college – compare yourself to bigger player in the market to make yourself seem bigger)
3) It has good financial backing
4) Google is only good/expert at one product: Search. It gets 98% of it’s revenue from Search. So if someone new enters the marketplace with new way of doing search or at least showing search results, people will talk about a company that is challenging giant like Google whose stock price is $477.52 (as of today).
Plus i think people are tired of seeing only player dominate the search market place. Challenge is who can provide better search results and dethrone the king. And that’s exactly what Cuil does: it challenges the big G and that’s why it’s getting all these free publicity. Key challenge now is to keep people coming back to Cuil after it’s 5 minutes of fame.
Question they need to answer is: Why should a normal searcher come back to Cuil.com after tomorrow? Why would media want to keep talking about this new company in a month or so?
Overall, i like it. Not bad to show results, they need to fix their images though.
Tejas
Learn, Have Perspective and Grow 