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Why Cuil is Like Toilet Paper
Written by Allen Stern - July 31, 2008
Earlier this week a new search engine launched to the world. The name of the engine is Cuil (pronounced Cool) and there are great reviews on Search Engine Land and GigaOm. Danny from Search Engine Land notes that Cuil is pushing four main features of the search engine: Big web index, Unique relevance algorithm, Unique results display and Privacy.
I've created a short video below to discuss why Cuil is like toilet paper. The bottom line is that when you come out of the gate and immediately challenge the absolute leader, it's a mistake. In addition, Google has absolute loyalty and to get average consumers to switch when they are loyal to a product or brand is very, very difficult. Making it even more difficult is that Google is free, so a lower-cost product pitch won't work either. What Cuil should have done was only speak about their features and let the users and the search industry decide if it's better than Google. So far it seems Cuil is the un-cool.
COMMENTS - Add New Comment
what a story title!
Thank you for telling me how to pronounce it.
I like the way I search now. And I like Quilted Northern.
i know qn very, very well
Currently $13.00 for a 24-roll pack on clearance at Big Lots. A better deal than Cuil. I'm just sayin.
many people put a lot of effort, money and passion into this product and all you can do is call it Toilet Paper.
For me this kind of behaviour is systematic of the kind of brash thoughtless and irrelevant comment that we see much to much of thee days in blogs from the USA.
I say go Cuil.. go and improve your creation this far you have created something that these side line bloggers can and will never achieve.
I'd say you are Jason Calacanis but your email doesn't match so I am not sure. It's clear you didn't watch the video because if you did, you'd see that I didn't say the product was like toilet paper. And if you watch the video, you might actually learn something.
Give me a call sometime so we can discuss what I have achieved.
Well stated. I tried it out, wasn't impressed, and stuck with my old TP brand. This product was hyped way too much....
Way too overhyped.
Btw, you'd probably be interested in this article:
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/07/31/inside_cuil/
Seems to me that everyone's missing the original value proposition of Cuil. Their original claim was that they were going to build a search index at 1/10th the cost of what Google has produced. Has anyone asked Tom or Anna at Cuil what their actual index/search costs are?
I'm not surprised that Cuil's search results are poor. It doesn't appear that they have anything special in terms of a Page Ranking algorithm at this point, but that really doesn't matter if they were able to achieve an index/search at 1/10th of Google's cost. If Tom & Anna achieved anything close to this cost savings I'd think that they would be prime picking for Google, Yahoo, Microsoft.
At this point, if Cuil can demonstrate an up-to-date index that scales to Google's level at 1/10th the cost, then I'd think Google or others would start taking a look at them.
Based on what (little) I know about Anna and Tom, it seems to me that their strengths are in the area of architecture and index. Anna is all about the index, she built Archive.org's index, then went to Google and built the TeraGoogle index, now it's the Cuil index. What people seem to be missing is that there's a big difference between the index and the ranking system. Without a competative ranking system Cuil can not compete (IMO), but they can add huge value to Google if they can reduce their web index to 1/10th, 1/5th, of it's current size. The cost savings in power alone would pay huge dividends I suspect.
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