3 Examples of Why Cuil Sucks

Posted by Ryan

November 17, 2008

I was recently reading a follow up article on Cuil. Some of you may remember Cuil got a lot of press in July of 2008 when their search engine launched. Many felt it was likely to be the first search engine to provide real competition to Google. A lot of this publicity came from the fact Cuil was developed by a group of Google Alumni who were experts in the search field.

After the launch, there was a lot of publicity about how Cuil really missed the mark. Indexing more pages than any other search engine doesn’t really mean anything if you can’t provide meaningful results. Cuil may have had a different look and some repackaged ideas from other search startups but its results were pretty awful. After reading the follow up article I thought I would give it one more try before I pronounced it totally useless. I searched for “Spokane Web Design” a phrase I often used to test search relevancy. This is a good phrase because I know the usual results for the term and I know most of the common competitors for this local search phrase.

Here is a quick capture of the results, check out my comments below:

1) DesignSpike is a Spokane area web design company and I don’t see any problem with them ranking well for this search. The problem I do see with this result is that the image which shows next to their company is one from the Spokane Symphony website. DesignSpike didn’t develop this website, nor do they host this website. This website was developed by iPowerplant which is no longer in business. Furthermore, the Spokane Symphony website has been redesigned 3 times since this image was part of its design. This makes me wonder how Cuil chooses these images and why?

2) Next on the list is ABEC Web Design. This listing has multiple problems. First, this company is no longer in business. ABEC Web design has not done any work since 2004 and the ABEC Web Design website has not been updated in at least that long. The website is still online, although, it is no longer in use. I often use this as a benchmark to gauge irrelevant search results. In addition, the image associated with this website has no meaning or correlation with the website. Why bother showing images if they are not relevant? The logo on Webbs Inc makes a lot of sense but the Equal Housing Opportunity logo makes no sense whatsoever.

3) The final result I wanted to point out is our company, Zipline Interactive. Generally we perform fairly well for localized search terms although we haven’t worked too hard to optimize locally as we are trying to reach a broader audience. Again, my problem with this listing is the image that appears next to it. They say sex sells. I don’t know how I feel about a half naked woman appearing next to our companies listing. The appearance to the untrained eye is that we’ve selected this image in some way to correspond with our website but this is not true. I am sure some of our more conservative customers would feel about this.

All in all you the search results weren’t that bad. Cuil was able to pull some relevant information out but I would rank the results not only worse than Google but also worse than Yahoo and MSN for the search terms I tested. This probably explains why they

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