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
—It’s the only thing that makes sense when you look at how bad the results are. You don’t roll out something like unless you are just showing off the interface. - Kevin Bondelli
—Would also explain the weak branding. Who cares, if it’s just going to get plugged into something else? - Chris Baskind
—Not very good results at the moment I will say - shinchi via twhirl
—It must be so hard to launch something in a realm where there isn’t much tolerance/patience for incremental improvement. The bar in this space is high and consumers are very picky. Look at Yahoo. Their search is actually pretty damn good. However, they keep losing share. - Sacca
—agree with Sacca - also, I thought the people behind Cuil had already sold some search technology to Google and hence they wanted to try it out on their own this time - so if anything they’d have more intent than others not to flip. - Adam Kazwell
. . .
—Google Killer? I do not even need to look to know the answer - Mike Reynolds
. . .
—It’s embarrassing IMO. The results are thin and the images completely wrong. Not good is one thing … Cuil seems a cut below not good right now. - AJ Kohn
. . .
—IMHO there have to be better ways to show off your very own crawling+indexing technologies than opening up to the public and getting thrashed for not delivering what people expect when you dub your service search engine. I have a hard time believing that the cuil/cuill guys did not know what they were doing though … Were they pushed to release by financiers? Were they in dire need of usage data? - Mustafa K. Isik
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.
(Photo by Steve Jurvetson).
It is only one day old - no one knows the future it has
How was Google or Yahoo during their first day as organic Search Engines
It does not have even a fraction of the budget or Developers the others have
This is more about managing expectations and trying to launch big when you don’t have the goods. There is a reason why people are reacting the way they are.
After doing a novelty search, that guy shows up next to one the results also:
http://www.cuil.com/search?q=mefeedia&sl=long
Who is this guy??
Erick, the reason why “CUIL” doesn’t return any result its own name in their search engine is because THEY CHANGED THEIR NAME to CUIL (with 1 L). And that happened overnight!!!
The funny part is that if you enter CUILL” (with 2 Ls), Google still returns it, but with Cuil as metatag. Isn’t that in itself is worth an article???
I’ve sent them an email informing them that CUILL (pronounced koo-ii as in hawa-ii), means testicle in French (word is “couille). Thus the domain might not be the best if they ever intend to reach french market..
…but couldnt the same be said for Twitter, yet Arrington et al cant get enough of posting masturbatory comments about it.
It sounds like you’re saying they shouldn’t invite TechCrunch to the launch because the expectations of the TC crowd are too high, which is off.
Eric, I think it’s always good to counter another hype with reality though one does not require to run over another company which isn’t the case as in this posts. I guess Cuil is just a “late entrant” in the competition and it will take lot of time for it to beat Google at its own game.
Just creating hype doesn’t work nowadays, for sure. Everyone wants to know “reality”. The truth. The bottomline.
oh and Flickr means homosexual in Dutch (spelled flikker)
TC is a hype cycle website. without it this site would be out of business. hype is a good thing if you can deliver or not. no such thing as bad publicity.
Why has no one noticed that they CHANGED THEIR NAME since yesterday???!!! They dropped one “L”. And you know why?… because i’ve sent them a message informing them that CUILL is pronounced “couille” in french, and it means testicle. isn’t that hilarious?
One day old or not, this has to go down in history as one of the post-bubble’s biggest web product failures.
You can’t do pr for your product as Google competitor and then bring a vic-20 inspired search engine to the table.
Can Cuil stay in the ring after getting a knock out blow in the first round?
Their product is so, so incredibly wrong, not just bad, that I wonder.
I don’t think it can stay for much longer. For me it just doesn’t work.
I think that they may be able to perform if given some time… nothing to do but wait and see. http://blabtech.blogspot.com
When google was new it was not an immediate success. I still greatly preferred WebCrawler as its results were much more accurate. It took about a year before i made the switch completely. Of course I have never looked back
Google will be replaced someday, and there will be no predicting which way it will go. In fact, the more sure people are of a new engine being the killer, the more sure you can be that it isn’t. It wont happen overnight.
I think the reason people think that it won’t succeed is because they can’t find what they are looking for.
Did you know that you can’t find a web page through cuil.com if it was established after June 2007? So much for a bigger index than Google.
Read more here: http://blog.buttermouth.com/20.....-find.html
It may only be a day old - but with 121 billion plus pages you would think you’d be able to use commands like intitle:, inurl: and site:. Heck, at this point I’d even take the NOT operator - Cuil is not so cool.
Both Google and Yahoo had these capabilities when they first launched the search engine. Even Yahoo’s directory in 1994 produced better results.
But even if they had come up with a good search engine, we would just go “Ohh” and “Ahh” for the first couple of minutes and then return to our googling. But not even that, talk about a long shot.
Thanks for your article. Indeed there are some major issues at hand. The photo from the “Wordpress” search is the NBC 5 Chicago morning team jic you were wondering. No idea what this has to do with Wordpress at all.
I really don’t care about cuil one way or the other, anything that is hyped as a Google killer always falls way flat. Google has over 10 years experience building their product and they have the smartest engineers in the world working for them. I don’t care who you are, you will not beat them at serach, period.
Regardless of that, I bet they regret having their name sound like “cool” - every story I read about them yesterday was of course a play on words on how “not” cool the product is. e.g. “Cuil is anything but”, “Too cool for cuil”, etc. And now this headline, “How to lose your cuil”. etc etc.
I think it’s funny but it’s already cliche to say that. It’s almost as bad as “But then the dream became a nightmare” - everytime I read that I think, someone needs some creativity lessons.
you suck
you swallow
Still, they shouldn’t over hype something that doesn’t even return results for most website names.
To Cuil founders,
Please remove those stupid, mandatory images next to search results. We don’t need a magazine front page, we just need to find the stuff we’re searching for.
The person on the picture next to “About Techcrunch” is Sam Flemming. He is founder and CEO of CIC (www.cicdata.com), China’s leading Internet Word of Mouth company.
@Marc van der Chijs is right, the “About Techcrunch” isn’t Michael Arrington, it’s me; but I don’t know who that bio is for, because it isn’t mine.
Whatever you did to achieve it, I can see a future career for you as a Cuil SEO expert.
Every six months there is a story about the next Google-killer and all the site seem to pick it up without doing any homework on the merits of the product. We can clearly see that this is again the case. There are plenty of non-Google-killer start-up sites that will never get half the press these guys did. Too bad…. So when is Michael starting the StartupCrunch?
Search for Cuil fails because they rebranded before the launch and NO PAGE on the web knew about them!
Try searching for “Cuill”
PS: Give the guys a brea, at least they LAUNCHED! When has one of you commentators actually launched something?
Oh yeah, they launched alright, they launched crap!
Anyone could launch anything that’s this bad. It’s ridiculous. When you tout yourself as a Google killer and you worked for Google, you set the bar pretty high for yourself. You give yourself a ridiculous name, your ranking algo has no rhyme or reason to it, you throw random pictures that have little or nothing to do with the site that’s listed and you had $33 million in funding. I am sure cuil stands for failure in some language.
Just finished an in depth look at the Cuil branding disaster (including the “rebrand”):
http://businessmindhacks.com/p.....t-branding
Yes, they LAUNCHED…But it was like launching a boat full of holes into a lake. What would they expect to happen in that case?
Another example: what would happen in an “offline search” situation, f.e., if you hired somebody to look though filing cabinets to for some paper documents - and they not only kept coming back with the wrong reports, but also the wrong photographs…???
There’s this really cool website called google.com - Sometimes I use it to search for things.
You’re very unique and ironic.
If this was an alpha launch it would have been OK but the publicity they generated as a “Google killer” and no mention of alpha or beta on their site means that if the results aren’t great, the reviews won’t be either.
Coincidentally, I’m speaking to a possible investor today about an entirely different search technology I’m working on (which is why I’m watching this story with interest)
That’s my whole thought. If they did what other companies do and release alpha and betas then this wouldn’t have kicked them in the balls like it did
worst. search engine. ever.
my granda knows of more relevant information than that piece of garbage.
Yeah, vanity searching that comes up with random strangers’ faces is really disorienting, and makes you doubt the images you see on other searches. Cute, but not useful.
Honestly, the non-hierarchical arrangement of the page is not helpful, either. There is less information on the page than on any conventional list-type search results page. I cannot refine terms because I cannot track changes in relevance of results easily….
As I said before they have big balls with what they’re trying to achieve and who they’re going against which is admirable and gets my respect. Hyping it up as something it is not (yet) might kill the baby before it took it’s first steps out into the real world though. In hindsight it would have been wiser to have a few bloggers / media people check it out and focus the hype less on the current product then on the long term ambition. Sell the current product as a milestone on a way to the bigger picture solution. but then in hindsight we are all smarter.
The picture is a good one though - you can just just hear it: pffffffffffttt t t tt ttt ttt chrrrrrtschhh bang!
People are too harsh on them, they mis-launched but maybe their stuff ends up being good. At least the harvesting is good.
this is the case of a bunch of really smart engineers falling in love with their smart technology, and forgetting about the user. bottom line, cheap indexing is supremely valuable and can be a significant competitive advantage. BUT NO USER GIVES A CRAP ABOUT HOW MUCH IT COSTS YOU TO INDEX YOUR STUFF! unless this translates to more $$ being invested in search quality, nobody gives a crap. all users care about are fast, quality results. for google or msft, yeah, cheap indexing = good. for a startup, you should absolutely 100% focus on solving the customer/users pain points, otherwise you’re DOA. so at some point cuil will run out of cash, and google will buy the indexing IP for a box of donuts.
Totally agree.
Right after launch, Cuil didn’t return any results for it’s own name:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/bradybd/2708789989/
Read my comment above so you can stop repeating this nonsense.
Suck it Dave, they rebranded and it’s their search engine. They should be able to find it. If Google changed their name, you better damn well believe that they would have all the search queries going in the right direction in a heartbeat. It’s a big screw up and what’s worse is that only a handful of people know they rebranded, non-tech people don’t know that and if the “cuil can’t find itself” joke gets even funnier.
Use Google to search for Cuil and you can stop excusing them.
It’s funny you guys talk about over hyping when it was really you guys who helped create the big hype by doing so many posts about cuil in such a short time, you got everyone alert and talking on the subject.
I test it , and it didnt gave me the right results.
And I used spanish words, and the results are dissapointing.
The harsh treatment is justified. This is a company/product that no one asked for, was over-hyped and under delivered.
The only time we will need another search engine is if the existing ones, especially Google, start to game, or censor, the results.
Yeah the images thing confused me too — I searched for a name and got an article result listing the name in a list for honor-roll kids. The article itself had no images whatsoever, but the accompanying image in Cuil was a porn image! With safesearch on and everything. That, methinks, is at best slightly awkward to get while at work.
Oh my gosh I did a search at work for a gentlemen I was researching. (I’m a librarian) I got two pornographic images. That was awkward.
Try Jaques Flach if you would like to see.
Cuil as seen via RSS timeline
http://tweetip.us/lkaks
Anna the Ex Googler does not get it. Her thinking still stay in mid 90s, when indexes and pages did matter, as Hotbot did. The soul of Google, I think, is collective intelligence, started from page rank 10 years ago. Cuil just tried to compete against Google with nothing relevant.
Try searching for anything and add a “.” period at the end of the query! Oops that’s the end of the search, cuil is not cool enough to ignore it, but says it can not find any results….
Joe -
Get with it buddy - when you put in bad syntax you’re going to get bad results. That’s end-user error. Don’t put periods in, period.
You obviously don’t know anything about making a user-friendly UI.
The coverage Cuil has gotten even just here on TC makes Fooky.com look like the next Google. Anyone else been reading TC long enough to remember the little scandal surrounding *that* one?
(And I kid not, Fooky returns far better results than Cuil, surprisingly.)
It cant find me information on ‘condoms’ for example but it can find it on the singular form. Its retarded. What lame overhyping
the only hype is from you guys
because almost everyone else see it as buggy and slow
and what type of brandable name is cuil for searching
You guys got off easy (so to speak):
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2.....il_launch/
I <3 Google.
Loren Feldman, 1938 Media. Cuil. What the f*ck is with this ex-Google losers? Search? Over. You are owned by Google. Robert Scoble must have designed this thing. Loren Feldman, 1938 Media.
That’s my boy.
Sunday night = hype, hype, MORE HYPE
Monday = it’s ok, has time to grow
Tuesday = crap, horrible, sucks…
Wo what is it TC???
The bar is already too high for search to launch a DOA platform like this. Maybe Cuil would have been cool 8 years ago, but right now, it just looks silly.
actually, i liked cuil
if you see it with the eyes of testing a beta
i like the multiple columns feature
assuming they can get the pics more accurately, i like the concept of having a pic beside the text… kinda reminds me of google’s news search
as one who doesn’t shy at looking thru 30 pages of a search result, only to repeat the process a dozen more times, i can say from experience that cuil DOES have some great potential with their indexing method… and i hope they can improve their stuff because i really do like it….
the MAJOR issue i have with their search is that they need to better identify SPAM pages… you know, the ones that have virtually every common search word meta’d into their page, only to find adds for cheap pills or such… these ought not ever come up in a search result, certainly not on the 1st page… cuil is clueless in this regard…
they need to better index the different MEANINGS of words, and index the different ones in the tabs above… if they can nail those tabs, they are going to have a HOT search engine!!!
but, please, post a BETA label on this site… because that’s all it is right now…
Got to give them credit for at least trying. They raised some $$$. I have to believe there must be more. Don’t give up in them yet.
Pretty amazing companies keep coming up thinking they can do search better and raise money.
I remember hearing that there’s no such thing as bad publicity.
That might all change with Cuil.
“everyone realized that it was selling a bill of goods”
they said they are indexing the web and they are. how is that a bill of goods?
seriously, what’s with this “in google we trust” stuff? google, yahoo, micro$oft, and now cuil are just utilities. they invest money in indexing the web. sometimes they decide that they know how to do some artifical intelligence on their data…sometimes valuable, sometimes not. basically, they’re tools. nothing more.
if cuil can index more cheaply and completely than google (cuil’s category thing makes it more complete, in my opinon), it’s better than google.
exactly…
for example, type in TERA into wikipedia, and it comes up with a page that describes various possible meanings…
whereas, if you type in TERA into cuil, their tabs aren’t as concise and usefull as wiki’s options…
this is where cuil could blow google away…. by using wiki smarts at splitting up a search into various possible topics, and combine that with google’s ability to easily use multiple keywords…. i’d be totally sold on that successfull matchup
Try searching for cobol on Cuil. Prepare to laugh.
Dude, that is hilarious.
For people who haven’t looked, the search returns 0 results…
…but there are a bunch of tabs like ‘cobol programming’ and ‘cobol jobs’ that return a ton of results.
OMG! try searching for “Larry and Sergey swordfight in my mouth!”
If Cuil really wants to succeed, it should allow webmasters to pick their own thumnail pictures. But that’s never going to happen.
GO GOOGLE!
why not?
they already can choose what little image shows up in the url bar…
also, google helped webmasters create special tabs that google’s spiders use, why can’t cuil help webmasters create special tabs that help cuil pick up the pic of the webmasters choice…
it’s totally doable, and totally easy …. if cuil becomes popular, it WILL happen, in my opinion…
My favorite is search for “Dengue Fever.” Half the stories about the disease feature pictures of the American Cambodian pop band by that name.
How quaint…a search for “George W. Bush” (without the quotes) returns no results.
It’s a shame. there are perfectly good ways to build hype and get user feedback without making a big crater. And it’s not like load testing a search engine is rocket science. Especially with $33m invested, they’ve got no excuse for inviting all and sundry and then having it demonstrate a number of obvious bugs and deficiencies before catching fire.
Even with the built-to-flip theory, I don’t see a lot of point in burning a million first impressions.