Comments on: How Big is Your Search Engine (and who cares)?

By: Dan Martin

Dan Martin — Wed, 18 Feb 2009 09:17:36 +0000

Actually we use a search engine to find what we really want fast and easily. We do not want to spend our whole time in a search engine (SE). We go to a SE because we have to not because we want to. I think goole is the best by far. I did some time with cuil and was not what i was hoping for.

By: Kathleen Zuckerman

Kathleen Zuckerman — Wed, 06 Aug 2008 14:14:13 +0000

(Amin) That’s an interesting perspective. You’ve summed up my and probably many other’s thoughts succinctly. If Cuil’s value proposition speaks only to the size of their search field they definitely have a problem.

Notably, they also don’t subscribe to the tenet of Web 2.0 that talks to being able to consume data anytime anywhere.

Check it out on your mobile device to see what I mean.

Good blog post on Cuil as well…. http://shermaneleven.blogspot.com/2008/07/revisiting-cuil-with-metrics.html

By: Amin Marts

Amin Marts — Tue, 05 Aug 2008 15:20:14 +0000

I’m in agreement with much of what has been said however let’s pretend Cuil’s creators are smarter than us. Launching Cuil to the public can and will serve as a ‘bug’ shakeout from both a technical and marketing perspective. The mis-associating of website pictures is a perfect example of Cuil’s technical shortcomings.

Being that search is the cornerstone of collaboration, it would make sense that the solution have hooks into many top tier collaboration platforms. Namely, Clearspace, Sharepoint, etc. Leveraging the ‘community’ to voice their approval and disapproval of Cuil’s feature functionality provides them with realistic metrics of what’s sticky and broken without going down the ‘open’ path.

The market for a new search engine is small to non-existent. This is of no surprise to anyone especially investors who are backing this endeavor. That said, the logical move is to leverage this ‘new’ search algorithm to enhance inter-organizational search within blended communities.

By: Dave Bascom

Dave Bascom — Fri, 01 Aug 2008 15:37:42 +0000

Um, I think their revenue model is to make a big splash and then get acquired by Microsoft. I don’t think they have any ads yet (like Google when it first started, only with crappier search capabilities).

By: Ryan Nagy

Ryan Nagy — Fri, 01 Aug 2008 15:32:52 +0000

Thanks for the info on Cuil. I did a number of searches and was surprised to find one that recieved NO hits, even though a similar search on Google yileded thousands of results.

What is their revenue model? I did not see any ads. Do they do paid placement?

By: David Scoville

David Scoville — Thu, 31 Jul 2008 16:33:56 +0000

Cuil is all hype… However, I like the images and 3 column layout. I wonder how things would change with rankings if Google changed their search results to a 3 column results page. Would marketers start targeting the 1st, 5th and 9th positions?

I like Cuil’s search suggestion drop-down box as well–somewhat like Yahoo!’s. Why hasn’t Google included an option like that?

By: Ash

Ash — Tue, 29 Jul 2008 17:44:01 +0000

I spent less than 20 minutes on Cuil because it wasn’t impressive. Sure adding pictures can be nice if you actually relate pictures that belong together. Some search strings displayed results of one website with pictures from another. I sense an uproar over that.

StumbleUpon does a great job of not only displaying pics but trying to focus on the image that will generate a click. This works for me. Images can increase clicks; a good thing.

But the reality is that search is more than number of indexes: convenience, timing, mobile access, services, community, etc.