James O’Sullivan’s Blog

July 28th 2008, a new search engine named Cuil ~cool launches and aims to take on Google!

Irish born Tom Costello, CEO and Founder originally from Drogheda is leading Cuil’s highly motivated and experienced team.

Cuil has the talent and knowledge required with ex employees of Google and IBM on the team they are surely bound for success.

Cuil claim to have a largest search index on the planet which is caused Google to sit up and pay attention.

Google have responded to their claim on their official blog post http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2008/07/we-knew-web-was-big.html

Basically Google are saying that they have the largest index but they don’t shout about it.

I guess the question is how relevant is Cuil’s index and how do their results compare to that of google?

So the following thoughts and questions come to mind.

• How relevant are their searches?
• How will they counteract Spam SEO techniques?
• Will Cuil be just a fad?
• What differentiates Cuil from other search engines?
• How can they make money?
• Brand recognition / equity?
• Will users bookmark cuil.com as their home page?
• What about user generated content?
• What’s their capacity?

            Seems as though Cuil got too hot after launching and suffered the digg effect as reported by techcrunch http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/07/28/andcuil-is-down/

Google have acquired so many web properties and applications over the years to help build a more relavent index.

Google analytics, docs, webmasters, books, journals….

Youtube

Blogger

Jaiku

Feedburner

Orkut

The list is endless but all have a common goal

• Acquire talent, knowledge, IP, users and to deliver a better a relevant experience for the user which help google deliver relevant ads to make money.

More on this one later..