SEO Blog

When the new search engine Cuil opened its site to public use on Monday, two curious things happened. The first was an enormous surge to try out the newest and potentially neatest search technology. The second was the crash of Cuil’s servers which were crushed under the unexpected weight of so many surfers.

The mass interest in Cuil (rhymes with “cool”) was more than the usual Monday morning meanderings as a means of procrastination. It is indicative of a massive wish for something different, an alternative to Google. That wish is expressed in headlines using phrases ranging from the terribly over-used “Google Killer Emerges” to the highly assumptive, “New Competitor for Google”.

It’s not that the Internet, web marketers or the media dislike Google. Every reasonable person recognizes that Google is the greatest information index in human history. Google’s existence and its excellence is a historic accomplishment.

Cuil was so popular on Monday morning its servers buckled under the load. Embarrassing as the downtime might be, it is almost understandable. People very much wanted Cuil to live up to its hype. Cuil did not anticipate the market’s want for something different.

Lots of sites get hit with massive amounts of unexpected traffic but that traffic is always there for a reason. Mass traffic does not happen randomly. Something drove massive amounts of people to the same place at the same time. In this case, that something was hype-fueled hope.

Web users don’t casually visit new search engines, even if they are procrastinating away the early hours of a Monday morning. They go there with a purpose. The Cuil spike shows a wish for mass migration.

We live in a world where personal power and economic opportunity stem from access to and understanding of information. Google is the conduit for the vast majority of Internet users. Almost every one of those reasonable people is so reliant on Google it is scary. People know that. Internet users, even breathless reporters, are pretty smart.

Even so, the hope for greater competition in the information mind space blinds even the smartest of commentators. There is still a lingering feeling that the Microsoft Yahoo deal would be good for everyone, for instance. In the absence of any meaningful competitor, anyone with the guts to step into the ring to fight the champ will be called the King for a Day in the simple hope that they can quickly lay claim to the crown.

Cuil was overwhelmed and, unfortunately, most of the visitors who could get through were distinctly under-whelmed by Cuil’s results.

Cuil is not a pretender to the crown, not yet anyway. Founded by former Google alumni, Cuil claimed to have the largest index of searchable media on the web with over 120-billion files. Google quickly counter-claimed to be indexing over one-trillion web documents but conceded that most of them were absolutely worthless, hence the 22-billion (or so) document index seen by the public.

Spread across three columns (can be changed to two) Cuil’s results pages are harder to follow than the standard ten – fifty blue links provided by Google, Yahoo and Live. The results sets are not entirely awful and, in Cuil’s defense, can be seen changing fairly regularly. Results displayed this week might be very different from results displayed a month from now.

Cuil also has a curious habit of placing images beside each search result. Unfortunately, those images don’t always reflect the topic of the search result. Vanity searches by a number of people in the search marketing community have produced funny results. For instance, Cuil places a picture of a woman beside one of the results for my name. At quick glance, it looks like I am dressed in drag, not exactly the business persona I wish to portray.

Cuil has a long way to go before it comes close to living up to the tone of hype surrounding its ill-fated launch. The amount of hype about Cuil should make all three major search engines pause a second and think. People very much want an alternative to Google and they clearly don’t see Yahoo or Microsoft providing that alternative.