Cuil is Corny

Earlier this morning, the self-purported Biggest Search Engine on the Web was launched by ex-Google employees. Boasting a large index and implying superiority to Google, expectations were high. Unfortunately, Cuil was unable to deliver on its promises and is probably one of the worst flops that I’ve seen in a while. Yes, it appears that I might have to recant the positive things that I said about it earlier.

Perhaps The Launch Date Came Too Soon

There were, and still continue to be, a lot of intermittent issues with the Cuil search engine service. And sadly, all of these problems could have been avoided with proper planning. This leads me to believe that the Cuil team just wasn’t prepared for the launch date. In fact, I noticed about five revisions to the News & Press release page between 6am and 8:30am CST. Clearly, the Cuil developers were scrambling to meet their launch deadline.

Below are some rather comical problems that I’ve noticed with Cuil:

No Search Results

When Cuil launched this morning, there was one thing that they forgot to do: prepare for traffic.

I attempted to search for corn flakes this morning. But instead of finding a page from Kellogg’s or Wikipedia, my search retrieved 0 results. I thought that was odd, so I repeated the search and used a as a query. Surely that would retrieve results. Nope, not one.

Later on in the day, Cuil realized that it was receiving more traffic than it could support, so the 0 results message was changed to the following:

What a shame! I was under the impression that search engines were built to handle lots of user traffic.

Irrelevant Search Results

Once you are finally able to retrieve search results, you might find that you are presented with a lot of unexpected and obscure websites. In fact, if you attempt to search for Cuil in Cuil, it doesn’t even retrieve results about itself!

Random Images Associated With Websites

Cuil also includes images with each result. While this is a good idea in theory, the problem is that most images are not only completely irrelevant, but they also do not necessarily belong to the site in question. For example, if you search for Velvet Blues, you will find a grey image with spanish words on it… Strange.

Slow Slow Slow!

Queries also take considerable time to process. However, this may be a temporary thing, related to excessive load, as they call it.

Clearly, this search engine would have benefited greatly from a longer development period, and perhaps an extended Beta phase.

I think that Cuil might have irrevocably alienated a good portion of what might have been its audience. And I am not alone. If you do a quick search of the internet — using Google, of course — you will find a lot of disappointed users.

So, does Cuil have a future? Let’s wait and see.