November 10, 2008 | Monday
Cuil – The biggest “Google killer” flop
By Ian McIntosh - SEO Executive in News |PPC |Search Engines |SEO
When Cuil was launched in July 2008 it was big news, Google’s dominance in the search industry was finally going to be challenged by a serious competitor. The pedigree was impressive, promising the world’s largest search index (121 billion indexed pages on launch), more relevant results, and promising never to store any personally identifiable information.
On top of this, it was being developed by by several ex-Google employees, Anna Patterson who helped develop the Indexing system currently used by Google, and Tom Costello who developed search engines for a living with IBM. It seemed that Cuil were on the brink of something special, and that Google were finally going to face a serious competitor. Nobody in the search industry were holding their breath.
Cuil’s global search engine market share increased in one day, from nothing to 0.26%, making it 106th most popular site on the web, and the 10th most popular search engine overnight (Hitwise). Pretty impressive, although it was to be expected given the amount of global publicity the launch received. Unfortunately for Cuil, the majority of people who did test the search engine through curiosity never returned.
There are many reasons for this (people struggling to pronounce the name being one), but the biggest Cuil flaw was that the results it served up were not the most related, and therefore the user headed elsewhere. Tearing people away from the likes of Google was never going to be easy, and displaying unrelated results in a slightly different format just did not make the grade in the eyes of most users. Users first impressions of Cuil were very poor, and that has sealed their fate.
Cuil’s search engine market share has consistently fallen since launch, currently holding 0.01% market share, along with its value which was once estimated at $200,000,000 just before its launch in July.
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This undoubtedly makes Cuil the biggest “Google Killer” flop of all time and there have been many contenders (remember Search Wikia). In order to challenge Google’s dominance in the search market, it is going to take something truly extraordinary. “bigger index” and promises of “more relevant results” are just not going to be enough to make any sizeable impact. The question is, where does Cuil go from here? According to their blog they are “taking a deep breath......and putting our heads back down to hard work”. However, the statistics tell the story that matters, and that is that Cuil is almost dead.
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