Cuil cooling down - a month on!
August 19th, 2008 by Andy Merchant
After a blaze of publicity Cuil launched on July 28th 2008, some of the headlines below suggested Cuil was going to overtake Google as the major force in search.
Cuil Launches — Can This Search Start-Up Really Best Google?
New Search Engine Cuil Takes Aim At Google
Search site aims to rival Google
Cuil search engine aims to challenge Google
Cuil might just be cool enough to become the Google-killer in search
Cuil Search Engine Out to Challenge Google
However, the graphs below from Twitter, Alexra and Technorati show an alarming drop-off in the volume of people talking about Cuil and visiting the site over the past month since its launch.
Twitter Mentions (Cuil in the red, Google in the blue) - click on graph to see larger graph.
Traffic History form Alexra
Technorati blog mentions of Cuil
Cuil blog trends vs Google
All the graphs say pretty much the same thing - after an impressive start Cuil has slipped back in-line with all the other wannabes!
Here are the headlines that seem to have the correct answer:
Why Cuil Is No Threat to Google
Cuil not a Google killer - yet - Techland
Can Cuil kill Google? Not yet - Machinist - Salon.com
The New Cuil Search Engine Sucks - Columns by PC Magazine
Cuil is not so cool - The INQUIRER
Danny Sullivan, editor in chief of Search Engine Land summed it up by saying “Competing with Google is still a very daunting task, as Microsoft will tell you.”
August 19th, 2008 at 6:20 pm
Cuil is definitely going for it, but it’s hard to imagine them doing anything but incremental changes to what Google’s done. And even that would take years of effort.
Me.dium.com has taken a different tack. We have a full web index, but we change the results based on the surfing activity of our user base (now over 2,000,000). It’s in alpha, but I’d be curious to hear your thoughts. http://me.dium.com/search
August 20th, 2008 at 8:41 am
Thanks for the comment Chris and the heads up on Me.dium. I will go check it out!