Cuil Search Engine Comes Out of the Gate Stumbling

According to cuil.com’s homepage at the time this article was written, the Cuil search engine indexes an astounding 121,617,892,992 web pages. The question is how they are indexed. Backed by big brains and bigger bucks, Cuil (pronounced “cool”) launched last night and was hardly welcomed with the parades and fanfare it was surely hoping for. In fact, we can’t recall the last time a product received this much bad press within 24 hours of its launch. Most would be overjoyed by not one, not two, but three consecutive articles on Techcrunch, not to mention the hundreds of other articles on blogs across the internet. Unfortunately it seems as though not many people had anything good to say. Search is a tricky space since Google swallowed it years ago and bloggers would typically root for the underdog as opposed to writing a young scrapper off immediately, but it might just be too hard to root for Cuil. Traffic to cuil.com may end up being the biggest bell curve we’ve ever seen. It has a great look and some interesting features but downtime, skepticism and perhaps worst of all, consistently bad search results have dug a hole that Cuil may never be able to climb out of. Come on guys; when we search “Cuil” we don’t get a single result about the site! Just about every search we ran yielded pretty terrible results, even our search for “Boy Genius Report” as seen in the image above. Well, maybe we’ll be the 121,617,892,993rd page indexed…

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