How To Lose Your Cuil 20 Seconds After Launch

Erick Schonfeld

The hype cycle now lasts less than a day. Take yesterday’s over-hyped launch of stealth search startup Cuil, which was quickly followed by a backlash when everyone realized that it was selling a bill of goods. This was entirely the company’s own fault. It pre-briefed every blogger and tech journalist on the planet, but didn’t allow anyone to actually test the search engine before the launch.

The company’s founders have a good pedigree, and have developed a unique way to index the Web cheaply and at massive scale. But creating a big index is only half the battle. A good search engine has to bring back the best results from that haystack as well. Here Cuil falls short, as we pointed out an hour after the site launched and we could actually check it out.

The story quickly turned from Google-killer to Google’s lunch (make that an amuse bouche). The results Cuil returns aren’t particularly great, and sometimes completely off the mark. For instance, a search for “Cuil” doesn’t even bring up a link to itself on the first page of results. (See screen shot at end of post).

And when Cuil tries to pair images with sets of search results, it often chooses seemingly random images to accompany a set of results. For instance, “Wordpress” is associated with what looks like a TV newscast team and “TechCrunch” is paired with a Gmail logo. And I have no idea who that person is next to the results for our “About” section.

The backlash goes beyond the blogosphere. Friendfeed founder and former Googler Paul Bucheit started this thread of deservedly harsh comments on FriendFeed:

Paul Buchheit posted a message
“Maybe Cuil isn’t supposed to be good. They must know that the results are bad, but they launched anyway. Maybe they aren’t trying to build a full search engine, but just want to demo their crawling+indexing technology with the expectation that someone will buy the company and plug in better ranking.”
. . .
—Where “someone” = MSFT, who has already shown that they are willing to pay a lot for non-functional search engines. - Paul Buchheit
—That is what I was thinking, too. - Robert Scoble
—You’d think they’d work toward getting something relevant if you search on “cuil launch” - Michael Markman

..........

If you are going to feed the hype cycle, you’d better be able to deliver. Because it only lasts about 20 seconds if you don’t.