Cuil – Not so Cool

Searches for “search engine optimization,” “internet marketing,” and “rubber stamps” yielded the following message:

“We didn’t find any results for “insert-term-here”
Some reasons might be…a typo. Please check your spelling.
your search includes a term that is very rare. Try to find a more common substitute.
too many search terms. Please try fewer terms.
Finally, try to think of different words to describe your search.”

When I tried the industry term SEO I finally got results that included, in the “Explore by Category” tab – Korean Pop Singers??? Whoa! One search term I tried brought up relevant results with a totally unrelated reference to cNet software.

The result pages are laid out completely different than the “normal” search engines with a three-column format. The listings often include an image although I’m not sure how they are making a determination on image selection because often the images didn’t seem to be related to the company or product represented – like it was just some random image from the site.

The people behind the search engine also stated that they had more pages indexed than Google . . . well apparently not if they are serving “not found” pages to typical terms.

My analysis – maybe it was launched too soon but right now Cuil is not so cool!!