It’s not everyday that a new, high-profile search engine rolls out. And it’s even rarer that a new search engine can boast that it has been engineered by former Google employees. That’s why Cuil (pronounced cool—it’s an Irish-Gaelic word for “knowledge”) has garnered so much attention.
When launched in late July, its online marketing agency hyped Cuil as perhaps the last best hope to compete with the mighty Google. And it may not have been a coincidence that Google, no doubt privy to Cuil’s scheduled debut, and possibly attempting to take the wind out of the feisty new search engine’s sails, had announced a few days earlier that it had indexed a trillion Web pages.
So how can Cuil compete with that? As of now, it can’t; at least not yet. Within hours of Cuil’s release, the search engine became a proving ground for search engine experts and enthusiasts who were eager to test the great claims of Cuil’s online marketing agency. And the resulting opinions were mixed.
It looks like Cuil does have some brains behind it, but it has an even better online marketing agency. The media hype that ran in concert with Cuil’s debut seems to have been the result of an excellent marketing campaign that was crafted by experts. They knew that the tech media, who are always looking for the next big thing, may have grown a bit tired of writing about Google’s apparent indestructibility. Cuil’s online marketing agency also knew that the media is always looking for a new angle on old stories. So when Cuil’s marketers presented to the press the opportunity to cover a search engine that maybe—just maybe—could create some cracks in Google’s dominance, the press hopped happily on board.
But with those bold declarations by Cuil’s online marketing agency came close scrutiny by search engine experts. And the verdict is that Cuil isn’t yet able to rank with the big guys in the search engine world. Simple searches returned pages and images that were completely unrelated.
There’s a lesson here, and it has to do with marketing. Cuil’s online marketing agency campaign was brilliant in that it earned the fledging search engine huge amounts of coverage. However, the search engine wasn’t at the level where it could back up its online marketing agency’s claims. With advanced engines like Google, Ask, MSN and Yahoo!, users have grown used to search results that are extremely accurate. And Cuil isn’t there yet.
For Cuil, a wiser path may have been a quieter debut while at the same time going through constant refining and revision. The opportunity to improve its listings without the amount of close scrutiny it has revived within days of its debut would have resulted in a stronger search engine and fewer disappointed users. There’s still a chance that Cuil will develop into a premiere search engine. But Cuil now faces the added difficulty of overcoming its online marketing agency’s initial vast, and ultimately inflated, promises.
