Cuil, One Week Later

Cuil (once again, pronounced “cool”) underwent a particularly messy launch last week. CEO Tom Costello and his team were expecting a few hundred thousand queries on day one, but the name Cuil seemed to have been making its rounds in the blogosphere even before the touted “Google-killer”'s launch. After the launch and about 50 million queries in less than 24 hours, Tom set to do a bit of damage control on its overloaded servers.

One week later, the Cuil team is still working the kinks out of the system, but that's to be expected. The results that the fledgling search engine returns have improved dramatically since then (Cuil can now find itself, for instance), and in certain queries can actually outshine Google's own results. But for the better part, users still aren't convinced that Cuil can actually put on Google's shoes and take over.

Apparently, it may even be unlikely. Tom himself says that Cuil was never intended to be a “Google-killer” as the media had portrayed it to be. He says that Cuil was meant to be a solid alternative search engine, to be used when users can't find what they're looking for in Google. Whether the Cuil team has shot itself in the foot with such comments remains to be seen.

After all, it's only been a week. Google has had years to bring its technology this far.

For now, I've found that Cuil submits broader results to my queries, which is somewhat interesting, but broader doesn't necessarily equate to more relevant. And despite the novelty of its tabbed browsing feature (which does some pretty cool guesswork, by the way), some totally unrelated results still manage to make its way into page 1.

One week on, Cuil's biggest draw is still its privacy policy. Unlike Google, Cuil doesn't record the search queries that users make. It doesn't take names or IP addresses, and doesn't leave cookies. This obviously a good thing for, well, people who like their privacy.

Unfortunately, I think 99% of search engine users look for relevance before anything else, and while Cuil has gotten better in seven days, it still needs a lot of work. The interface is novel enough, but it has this annoying little habit of posting an image along with a search result every darned chance it gets. Some of these images are so unrelated that it's embarrassing.

In my last post about Cuil, I also ranted about Wikipedia still not making it to page 1, but I now think that's a moot point. After all, if it did, Cuil wouldn't be so different from Google, and in the process do its users a disservice. That, and Wikipedia isn't all that hard to bookmark and access anyway.

All-in-all, with the improvements we're seeing after a mere seven days, I don't think it's reasonable to dismiss Cuil just yet. The next week might have something even better for us. 

Like maybe a new, easier-to-pronounce-and-remember name. Give me a nod if you're thinking the same thing!