Cuil, the search engine launched at the beginning of the week with brassy fanfare and progressive decrescendo on Monday, still looks about the same on Friday. It’s faster, at least, without 50 million—seriously—queries hitting its categorized servers. The images are still a bit out of whack, the categories still odd, the results certainly alternative.
Regardless, the important part is the 50 million searches conducted the first day of launch. “[T]hat’s in the same ballpark as Microsoft’s Live Search and approaching Yahoo!. And they have a bit more infrastructure than our small start-up,” the Cuil team blogs. The traffic “outstripped” their ability to respond, causing some machines to fail, and, as we know, the masses to be underwhelmed.
Hitwise’s Bill Tancer reports that Cuil premiered at position #106 of all Internet sites, in tenth place among search engines, grabbing 0.6% of search share on Monday. Not quite Live Search or Yahoo ballpark, not even in Ask or AOL’s either, but really kind of startling for a debut.
Tancer also reports that a third of Cuil’s traffic originated from other search engines, and over a quarter came from news and media sites. After hype and subsequent deflation, Tuesday’s traffic wasn’t quite the same level and Cuil’s rank dropped to 197, and 12th among search engines.
But still…
Those numbers illustrate some interesting things about this launch, and one crucial point beneath the surface. First point: a lot of credibility and disclosure to the right sources goes a long way. Sarah Carey, Cuil’s communication strategist and columnist for Ireland’s Sunday Times, blogged this morning she sent word to no more than 20 journalists.
Sounds like they sent them to the right journalists who were able to recognize the Stanford/Palo Alto/PhD/former Googler search brains behind what was effectively touted as the world’s biggest search engine, and the fever just spread from there. Google’s post about scanning a trillion URLs daily also suddenly has interesting timing, published just a couple of days before Cuil hit cyberspace.
Second point, the important one: It appears the Internet is hungry, starving even, for a Google competitor. All that goodwill, all that hoisting to the top, bestowed on Google all those years has lulled in the face of a now spooky Internet steamroller. Who would have thought Yahoo would be rendered virtually impotent? All that good will, all that hoisting to the top was waiting for Cuil, and unfortunately for its founders, Cuil’s crowd-surfing ended badly.
But they sure got everybody’s attention quickly, nobody’s more than Google’s, you can bet. If Cuil can be fixed—and it needs to be fixed relatively soon—then a second go at it looks not just possible, but potentially very successful.
They may want to trim their budget a bit and invest on some infrastructure and scaling, though. Carey’s now famous prose style shined quite the light on the inner workings at Cuil and how they’ve been spending their VC money. That post was deleted from her blog, but you can still take a peek via Yahoo’s cache. This section is an eyebrow raiser:
Lunch is ordered in every single day. Huge fridges burst with snacks and drinks. Bowls of strawberries and muffins lie around the rest area.
The company pays for a personal trainer and gym membership for everyone. A doctor calls round each Friday, after the weekly barbeque, to see if everyone’s in good health. Employees drift in an out at times that suit themselves.
When I observed this behaviour first I was appalled and took my CEO friend aside. This was disastrous! His company would never succeed if he wasted money like this and didn’t crack the whip. He laughed. This is the way it works out here.
Well, they say you should dress for the job you want and not the job you have. If a company wants to be the Googleplex, one might suppose they should start acting like it.
