Cuil Search Engine, Series of Unfortunate Events

The engineering team guiding Cuil has outstanding search engine credentials; however, the early reviews for the system are less than stellar. Anna Patterson from Google, Louis Monier of AltaVista and eBay search engine fame, Tom Costello from IBM and designer of the search engine Xift and Russell Power of Google’s Internet archive search engine team comprise the powerhouse of experts behind Cuil.

Yet with all this expertise many problems exist and some are quite systemic and potentially fatal.

Cuil Search Engine Problems

Amidst huge press hype the potential problems were largely ignored. The data base Cuil claimed was lauded as fact and the issue of privacy was heralded as a triumph over Google. However, once the test results began to show, these unanswered or unverified issues became the target of media retaliation.

Jason Mick of Daily Tech said on Tuesday: “While the hype was high for this search engine founded by former Google brains, complaints piled on soon after launch.”

Saul Hansell of the New York Times wrote: “The introduction of Cuil…was marked…with…rather negative reviews.”

In Conde Nast’s Portfolio Tech Observer, Kevin Maney asked: “How does it stack up? Well…Tech-Crunch did some testing and found that Google returns way more results.”

It was discovered that Cuil had two sets of problems; initial startup (which was to be expected) and inherent general problems that tend to be far more serious.

Initial Problems with the Cuil Serach Engine

Hansell continued: “The site…had its share of technical problems, going down completely for a while….The site…tried to handle 50 million queries in its first day of life, far more than it expected.”

While inconvenient, to business watchers this may be a good sign of desirability and interest by the consumer. The negative is that many users became dissatisfied. On Mick’s comment site, a tech savvy potential customer, Chocolate, wrote: “Not for me. I think I’ll keep searching with the Google powered www.treehoo.com search engine….”

Cuil Search Engine has Long Term Problems

Marketers know that unless the customer accepts a product, no matter how good it is, the probability of success may be low. Com-Score, a worldwide Internet marketing firm for the technology & pharmaceutical industry, mentions several items that are necessary for a product to be successful. Possibly 3 of the 4 items Com-Score mentioned to “Market Your Product” were missed by Cuil.

• Understand your customer
• Identify powerful co-marketing partners.
• Design more effective marketing and advertising programs”

The Times quotes Anna Patterson: “We were overwhelmed with traffic that was not the standard pattern.” This goes directly to “know[ing] your customer.” Maybe Cuil’s standard pattern is not the customer’s standard pattern – at least now.

Michael Liedtke, AP business writer reported: “Cuil had kept a low profile while… [searching] for better ways to search.” Certainly proprietary information must be kept secret but gaining “co-marketing partners” would help in identifying and fixing potential problems early so as not to alienate customers.

Cuil’s marketing concepts fell far short. Google, a homonym of googol taken from the mathematical axiom of 10 to the power of 100, has a memorable sound. The homophone for Cuil, from Celtic folklore, leads the user down an arduous path. Conte Nast’s Maney wrote: “A new Google competitor…is called Cuil and pronounced 'cool,' which right there is one confusing strike against it in the word-of-mouth [marketing] campaign.”

Jason Mick concluded: “In the long run Cuil's success or failure will revolve on whether it can redeem itself by producing better results and show reliable, error-free operation even under demanding conditions….However, for near future Cuil seems inevitable to become the laughingstock of the tech community and a cautionary tale of concrete offerings falling short of hype.”

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