Cuil is Uncool
For anyone who missed the flurry of news over the startup Cuil, I think it’s an interesting look at what’s wrong (at times) with Silicon Valley. Despite being full of ex-Google employees and $30+ million in funding, all they have is a crappy search engine that sucks. It might be because they were too busy eating muffins and strawberries.
It’ll be interesting to see where Cuil goes. The search relevance is so bad that some people speculate it isn’t about search, it’s about flipping their indexing algorithms. Considering the high amount of funding, I have a hard time believing anyone will pay for this.
Quite possibly one of the funniest things to come out of this was the jab from Yahoo. Using their BOSS API, Yahoo created a search mashup called Yuil. Yahoo has since taken down Yuil, but it was a funny shot at Cuil while it lasted.
Despite how much the product sucks, I do have to hand it to Cuil or whoever did their marketing/PR/advertising. They were all over the blogosphere and major new sites. I haven’t seen a launch blitz like this in a long time. Hell, they got me to say something.
Adi Oltean Said,
August 2, 2008 @ 5:03 pm
I give them credit, though, for a clean way to display search results (in a news-style tabloid format). The tab-based search categories is interesting. I am would be not surprised if Google copied some of their layout/display/categorization ideas …
Andrew Said,
August 2, 2008 @ 6:49 pm
Adi: You have a point, but it’s nothing revolutionary. People have tried similar layouts before and they didn’t make a dent in the market.
Dom Said,
August 7, 2008 @ 3:12 pm
It’s hard to be revolutionary in search space. What matters is search relevance and presentation. Live has proven that simple stuff like too bright font on white page makes it harder to use search. IMO they nailed UI. Now it’s time to fix query results…