Remember the ill-fated Google-killer Cuil? Named ‘Cuill’ and very much in stealth mode for the first part of the year, they finally emerged end of July 2008 with a ‘massive’ search engine that would rival the most popular search engines of our time with an enormous index, an innovative interface and some nifty features.
Rival, it never did. The launch of the search engine was nothing but a classic PR trainwreck, with much hype and little to show for. Cuil failed to deliver good enough results to drive anyone to change their search behavior, and quickly became the subject of backlash and criticism because of their poor performance and indexing methods that actually took websites down in the process. Last time we reported about Cuil, was when their VP of Products (and AltaVista founder) Louis Monier quietly resigned from the startup.
With the end of the year approaching, I took a peek at how they’re doing traffic-wise out of sheer curiosity. After all, with no less than $33 million in funding and a founding management team consisting of ex-Google search experts, something had to give, right?
Well, no. Cuil isn’t performing well any way you look at it, and I can only imagine how nervous the startup’s management team and investors must be by now. Based on the numbers and graphs we gather from Google Trends, Alexa, Compete and Quantcast, you could even say search engine traffic is nearing rock bottom. Apart from that, a Cuil search for ‘TechCrunch’ still displays a Gmail logo rather than our own.
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Not so much because of their PR, but their site’s black background turned me off the first time I visited their site in July. Why would anyone launch a black-background search engine.
Amost the same happened to the first ChaCha, until they changed their business model. Cuil has a great and experienced management, but may be that doesn’t equal creativity in site layout design, which is the core turn off for nearly every user.
Right on. Black UIs are [still] trendy with the “cool” designers. However, a black UI sucks and repels visitors.
Management is generally clueless when it comes to this simple fact: designers know nothing about PR and business. Cuil’s concept is still good but if you are going against the leader in the space you cannot afford to be sloppy and careless about *anything* if you really want to succeed –Guess that when you have a lot of VC money, you wrongly believe that everything is going to be OK. But not, just ask Steve Case and his “Revolution Health” stupid toy…
they need to contact a “location engine” specialist and he could cure all there ails.
The same goes for Revolution Money. They are having massive layoffs there. I wouldn’t be shocked to see them go under soon.
Apart from the UI, the core algorithms also have a long way to be tweaked. The summer launch seemed more like a premature PR detonation.
Here’s what the Comic Book Guy (From the Simpsons) had to say about Cuil :
http://flickr.com/photos/anirudhkoul/2728387587/
Agreed. The only way the Cuil website could be more obnoxious is if it had some stupid-looking snow script running.
The problem with Cuil is to think that cool web design really matters for web search. The advantage of Google is exactly that they have a transparent web design and great results. Cuil, on the other hand, wants to sell a “cool” ui with bad search results…
Why would you say Cuil has a “great” management team? They managed out a piece of crap product. It’s the company leaders’ fault (Anna Patterson, etc) that this turned out so badly, no one else’s.
I stated that the management are supposedly great and experienced, because they are ex-google, who were previously involved in developing search indexing at Google, and is what they supposedly are doing now at Cuil. So, based on their prior experience, they know their product, except that they may lack the art of creativity, user-point focus, and marketing in order to pull off Cuil.
“Louis Monier quietly resigned from the startup”
How do you resign quietly? Whan you are asked to leave?
Certainly not when you are offered a better job somewhere else, you are nice and everybody likes you… Or when you are an a***le, fight with everyone and brake the furniture before you leave your office…
Sorry, forgot to include a link to the article in question, fixed it.
http://www.techcrunch.com/2008.....er-launch/
with every one still think google is the new hot blond girl @ school…no way any search engine gonna make it, unless the idiots @ yahoo start think as they were doing on 90’s.
I did try using cuil couple of times, but i can say one think about guys there..really good guys, but its time to rethink about things!
Robin, just a minor thing..
The uh oh point on the graph is that bottom curve wherere we see the validation of the trend being changed not the tail end, sir.
I could go into the statistical explanation buts its too early in the freaking morning. Suffice it to say stats wise the uh-oh trend moment is that bottom of the curve not the tail end.
The way I figured, was that the launch brought attention and traffic, and it’s normal for traffic to decline after that first momentum. By now, it should have picked up or showed some signs of increasing at least.
@Robin - Regarding the headline, shouldn’t it be “Cuil Fails” instead of Cuil Fail?
Nuh uh. Check headlines on http://failblog.org/
It was obvious CUIL would fail, who would really use a clone of a monster with dreams of beating the monster
Investors lost the money!
Oh ya! can you explain how it was obvious?
Read their launch news/posts/stories and the bragging they did!
How will that contribute to their failure? Nobody reads them (not at least the general public who doesn’t have time).
Cuil? I knew it was going to Fhail the first time I saw the horrible black background and the way that the search results are displayed. That magazine type look doesn’t cut it for a search engine.
In French, we say “ça s’est barré en couille”. (It went down the drain”!)
“use a clone of a monster with dreams of beating the monster” –Google will eventually be relegated to second, third or lower place in the big scheme of search companies…
Oh, BTW, Google, although excellent when it comes to search, it is not its main feature now that it has become an advertising company: ads are their main source of income.
Its crawling capacity is simply awesome! A few weeks ago I posted a comment on TC and while doing a Google search, it was listed about 30 seconds later!!!
As much as I like using Google, I believe you’re right. Most people are just too shortsighted to realize that it’s only years before what happened to Yahoo and others in the 90s is bound to repeat itself. Innovation in search is certainly welcome, but Cuil struck out this time. Time for more players to get in the game.
And sites like this will bash them as an out of touch company who should have sold to Microsoft….
maybe they should have started small and not brag so much.
I have to respectfully disagree.
They did everything right…BUT deliver a product. The marketing was fantastic, bragging was perfect. If I had a great product, I’d want their marketing.
I completely agree. Cuil’s PR and marketing were fantastic. Their product simply didn’t do much of anything better than Google or Yahoo! or Microsoft, or Ask. For the most part, in my limited experience, it did worse.
But then again, if their product was not too great should they have invested so much in PR/Marketing?
I’d fire their CEO, VP or Product and hire their CMO and head of PR right away. The latter did a fantastic job.
I never liked the column layout.
I think my blog gets more daily traffic…
2 Million uniques in launch month…WOW…I’d be curious to see a comparison and analysis on launches.
How did they get so many uniques at launch?
Often the TC bounce is usually only 15k-20k uniques.
I’d still say you could argue it was a successful launch to be at 200k visitors per month a few months after…no?
Well…maybe not when you factor in $33 million in funding and no viral growth…still 2 Million at launch month might be a record for a new company for what I can recall.
And I don’t think they even did any advertising.
they were also featured on cnbc cable tv station so tech crunch wasnt only ones giving them press.
They were everywhere the eve of their launch… even small town papers picked up the story. Probably got better press than Twitter ever has.
They were front page on BBC news, and all over most news wires. I don’t know how they did it, but the launch hype was immense.
Am I the only one noticed, cuil actually improved over the last couple of months ? Cuil is just down but not dead, I hope they will survive and strike back someday. I want more tough competition in the search industry
Hells yeah they failed. Oh wait, former Google employees + former Altavista founder = a company worth of venture funding? Any VC that gave them a dime got what they deserved.
If the Valley started putting an emphasis on great concepts instead of throwing money at any former Googler/Yahooer/etc that wanted to start a company, we’d have much better startups coming out of Cali and everywhere else
This is too bad. Cuil had a real strong technical team and some heavy hitters in the search field. This segment needs a big lift and Google needs a good competitor with lots of machine learning, maybe NLP and newer avenues of search and Cuil had the DNA to do some. I had read an excellent article from one of the cofounders of Cuil about how to build a good distributed crawler and the points to focus on when one designs such a monster (actually have a working prototype in my home lab). She was an ex-Googler and a Phd from Stanford.
I feel bad that such entrepreneur with so much knowledge and experience did not succeed.
SG
Perfect “Uh-Oh” visualization! This should show up in google images for queries: “Uh-Oh,” “Fail,” “SOS.” You get the picture
@kynamdoan <- twit
Black background the problem? Column layout? Got evidence of that? Who cares as long as it works better.
But it doesn’t work: search results that are basically correct, but show images that don’t match the result, etc. That fundamentally undermines credibility.
But how about the name, “Ciul”, oh, whoops, that’s “Cuil”. How do you pronounce that anyway? Gotta get that press release out in front of the big word-of-mouth campaign.
Who cares about a badly designed site?
Just the users and visitors, you idiot….
That’s why myspace is so successful, because of their design.
But honestly, people could care less. Design and what not is always over estimated. Yeah, people might appreciate your design but they won’t stick around for it.
Excellent evidence, and put so well, too, Matthew! I’m sure you’re right, nevermind.
Ciul means ‘hobo’ in Polish, hehe!
I don’t think the name is the issue here. Remember that we live in a world of Google and Yahoo. I’m sure those names sounded silly when first put on the table.
Cuil’s oft-bizarre search results — and even-more-bizarre mismatching of results with seemingly (and hilariously) random image thumbnails — led “reddyenumber4″ on Reddit to dub a standard unit-measurement of surreality in its honor, with “One Cuil = One level of abstraction away from the reality of a situation” (symbolic notation uses the interrobang character, “‽”); see more with descriptive examples registering up to 6 ‽ on the scale here:
http://www.reddit.com/r/worldn.....ms/c06cqxb
The column layout could be a problem. Search results need ranking, which is provided nicely by a vertical list. In Cuil’s column layout, #1 result is probably the top left, but what is #2? To the right or below? It is not as quickly scannable as Google, Yahoo, or Live, even if it is prettier.
33 million USD? Would somebody please throw that amount towards me? How about 3.3 million? Man, I could make my venture fly with that.
Money doesn’t buy success. They’re still a startup and will have to earn their way. With that said they do have money and experience which is a large part of what is needed.
It ain’t Kewl for me. In Google I have #1 listing rank for my name (w00t!) but in Cuil, i don’t rank. So maybe it is a better product after all!
Seriously, a black background? Are they going to create an anti-email client?
Perhaps they are trying to be contrarian. Not a bad time to be, but even a stopped watch is right twice a day.
Black UI, poor performance, VP quits silently - isn’t it same PR stuff? No matter if professionally done or not.
For some reason I like the product. Of course it was too ambitious claiming they’d beat Google but they deliver not bad results, the new way of representing search results is interesting too and the ‘Explore By Category’ feature is really cool.
Ladies and gentlemen, if we (users) are so skeptic that someone would ever beat Google in search - then it will really never happen.
I respectfully disagree.
“All” one has to do is change the game, and fight on their home turf. Cuil tried and failed. “But there is another,” says Yoda.
There will be at least five that attempt this general strategy in 2009. One will succeed (although it may take until 2013 before it’s obvious that they beat Google at search.) Granted, Google may buy them, if they are quick on the draw. But more likely, Google will remain dominant in “traditional” (2008-style) search, and 2008-style search will become less important.
In 2020, 2008-style Search will be old news.
“..says Yoda”???
Geek alert.
Damn! I need these guys on my previsualization team! Want a job?
Randy Adams
CEO
Searchme.com
The first thing i looked is their domain name, it’s hard to remember, even my kid can’t even pronounced it let alone remember it. domain name is prime factor for me, easy to say it , easy to remember it, the better it is. maybe that another reason why they can’t beat Google , i visited their site once and never went back.
Nat
http://www.workersinc.com
That’s funny. I clicked on your URL and closed the browser when it took so long to load… and I won’t be back there ever.
Man I could make my idea go with just a lousy $1 million…. oh woops. I never worked for Google. and I don’t live in the bay area. Damn.
All aboard the FAIL boat.
I was told about this website by a colleague, I was immediately turned of because the search results were really inaccurate.
Cuil is a red-ocean “me-too” product. They may produce results as good as Google’s, but then why wouldn’t we just continue to use Google? Their traffic isn’t as awful as the chart above suggests: compete.com has them at 250K/uniques, which is actually not too bad but definitely isn’t what one would hope for after spending $23MM (of course, we can also say they spent just .03% of the GMAC/Cerebrus bailout, and we’ll get nothing for that; at least Cuil produced some good tech). This company probably needs a little less PR and a little more work on the biz side.
Compete also under estimates by factor 3. Which is still not so bad in traffic.
I tried Cuil once and never bothered to try it again. Why?
1. Hard name to remember and easy to misspell
2. Idea for the service was half-baked and wasn’t cool enough for people to jump on it. It did not alleviate any “pains”.
3. No amount of good PR can make poor service popular/profitable.
Just my 2 cents
Apolinaras Sinkevicius
Congrats Cuil, you are the Titanic of the internet. Unless you have Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet working there and they fall in love right before you lay everyone off, you guys just flat out sucked.
Vaccum is filled by google , very little space left for cuil to prove. As users we all are trying to compare them with google on the other hand cuil also trying to show us they are better than google!
we dont want another search engine similar to google search engine, we want a search engine what google cant do!
- Chandra
http://www.myjil.com
Social Money Engine
Not as good as Google but it works for us.
The site is up and running, plus, they have plenty of cash. So it is not a matter of lack of talent, but they need to make some adjustments.
Suzanne O’Brien
Very few people I spoke to ever though Cuil had a chance. Besides Cuil being a complete PR mess, the product was launched way to early. Cuil would have been better off to build a stronger product before releasing to the public. You get one chance to impress users. You don’t get second chances.
“Cuil would have been better off to build a stronger product before releasing to the public.”
You are assuming they are capable of doing so.
So, is this a case study in how TechCrunch is able to kill companies with one blog post? I hope they survive just to spite TC.
Who said they won’t survive? And do you really think TechCrunch can make or break companies? Come on.
“”@Robin - Regarding the headline, shouldn’t it be “Cuil Fails” instead of Cuil Fail?
–Robin, it seems that the problem is that you are not using American English [you know that TC is in California, right?] and by using “fail” as a noun it looks that you are already considering Cuil as a dead, failed company… which is NOT true. It is not TC doing this, it is you.
American English: “fail” as a noun is an exception, used on specific cases –this is not one of those exceptions. The correct way is using it as a “verb” –Cuil Fails, is failing or failed. The correct way to learn words is consulting a/an [American] dictionary, not quoting a blog, whatever the blog is…
Of course language differences may lead to misunderstandings. Guess that you are not expected to know American English because you are European, based in Brussels…
Peace
Jonathan
Follow up –I understand the language differences: I had, at different times, an assistant from Belgium and later, a young lady from Finland, and it was always a struggle to understand the meaning of what they were saying, in English they learned back home and also the “English” they were “learning” from watching American TV…
BTW, I am American and live in the Washington DC area.
Robin, i covered you. Sorry, i couldn’t miss this
@Robin, @Prokofy:
Guys, I think it’s obvious that opinions make TC a really good source of news. Of course there’re drawbacks down this path.
I would agree with Robin that TC can’t make or kill a company. For instance, TC is heavily trying to make Seesmic but it’s traffic is way lower than Cuil’s.
But that’s the beauty of it, is it not?
@Jon using Fail as a noun is a meme, it’s not a language thing.
Hi Robin,
All of your comments are showing under me at backtype (http://www.backtype.com/prashant2228) and friendfeed (http://friendfeed.com/prashant2228) …. just wanted to alert u
@Prashant: You need to review the URLs you claimed on your BackType profile:
http://www.backtype.com/home/claim
You should only be claiming URLs that belong to you:
http://www.backtype.com/faq#q4
If you have any questions, contact me @ chris [at] backtype [dot] com
@Chris: thanks for the clarification. Did the necessary corrections … and the world is back to beautiful again.
Great tool … can’t believe I am actually seeing all the obscure comments I ever made.
“@Jon using Fail as a noun is a meme, it’s not a language thing.”
Robin, first, you declare a company dead when it is not. Second, a “meme” IS a language “thing” — You are either on medication, drunk or just a stupid retard.
And, my friend, maybe it is just ignorance or an “European” thing. I cannot tell the difference.
I would recommend you again, that to learn the meaning of words, the best thing is to consult a dictionary. Smart kids already know this…
It’s not about the GUI. And it’s not about the PR. There are lots of successful sites that have had bad GUI’s and/or bad PR.
It is purely about results. Cuil returns absolutely sucky search results. If the results were better, more to the point and more intuitive than other search engines (especially Google), it would have been a hit.
Google wasn’t an instant success. It developed users over time. And its super-simplistic design was criticized in a time when hot sites were expected to have more awe-inspiring designs.
Cuil deserves to fail.
Does anyone remember the Yuil effort (powered by Yahoo! BOSS) that came out when the Cuil train-wreck was announced. If I remember right, the Yahoo! dude made it in 4 hours or so with BOSS.
That’s smart and may be that is the way to go for any “search company” in the future.
-Mark
I disagree, any API based search engine can only become marginally better than the original. You have to have your own index to create better results. If Yahoo hasn’t indexed that one relevant page, how is my BOSS app ever going to find it? And why would I go to a simple BOSS powered search engine if the results are the same as on Yahoo? Yahoo is the home page of so many, why leave to get the same results?
i knew cuil was going to fail. I tried to search porn using cuil and i got the crappiest results. So cuil was going to be a failure because it sucks at porn searches.
You hit the nail on the head. Porn searches are the real test of any search engine. None of them do great, but google does a decent job. The cuil people should have tested their search results using porn searches. Why? Because porn sites use every trick in the book to get every search request to go to their site, no matter how irrelevent the search. Any search engine that can successfully get you a list of actual relevent porn search results will jump to the top of the search engine heap in a matter of days.
I’m not surprised with this at all. Google is way to strong right now for anyone even to make an attempt to shut them down. I also found that Cuil was to media intensive to my liking. Google is simple and loads so much faster than it’s competitors.
Cuil is uncool. nuff said.
Hey, they finally got around to adding my site
Too bad they made a complete mess of the description, which looks fine on all the other SERPs.
Cuil is dead! YAY!
I don’t think that cuil is updating their existing index.
Nothing about management or Layout. How can the seach engine supposed to to take down Google return the logo of “consumer product safety agency” when you type in Obama?
They wasted the PR they created. I thing they should go into web promotions since they are no doubt excellent at it.
What?
People are saying the reason cuil failed because of management, the interface or/and the name. I disagree. the product was inherently flawed. The way it was hyped in one day was unbelievable. They should begin a career hyping/promoting businesses online since they are good at that. get it?
http://www.shamebox.com/view/t.....-epic-fail
Cuil’s CEO, Tom Costello, dumped in the Shamebox.
http://www.cuil.com/search?q=burning+toasters
Hey, who put softcore images in my search results?!
No, you may _not_ question my choice of search phrases. Or, please don’t, anyway.
The images must all be random — that’s all I can think of to explain the lack suitability.
I like the design though… for “Barnabas Nagy” - my name - I also got strange results… among many, lots of blogcatalog tagged page where I’m not registered any longer. Strange.
Honestly, not a big surprise. But doesn’t $33 million in VC funding show that they might have some future?
A competitor to Google had better come with their A-Game, and this site didn’t. Obnoxious design and inconsistent indexing results sank this one quick.
Well, the first thing they did wrong was say they were better than Google (their searches). THEY set the expectation of what users could expect, the users did not.
Once people found out that the fact that the search results (and site design) is worthless, why even come back?
They did it to themselves.
I just did a vanity search on cuil after reading your post, Robin, and it brought me up first for “Aral”, ahead of the darn German petroleum company and that dried up sea (an honor Google has yet to bestow upon me).
I guess cuil gets my vote
At least they no longer have any performance issues because of the servers being overloaded with visitors
agree with zoso, they hyped it too much in the beginning thinking the launch was the most important thing, but thereby set themselves up for everyone to say it was crap when it didn’t compare to google. much better they had spent that PR money on engineering and organically grown the brand through a great product.